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I. HORACE MI, OF MASSACHUSETTS. 



THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY. 



Representatives, August LI 



The House being in Committee of the Whole 
en the state of the Union — 
Mr. MANX said: 

Mr. Chairman : On former rceasions, T have 
expressed myself so much at h ngth on the re- 
lations which the free States are made to bear 
to slavery, that I did not propose at this ses- 
sion to present any further views upon that 
subject. But the ban which the bite Haiti- 
more Conventions have haughtily proclaimed 
against bee discussion ; the recent, though, as 
I believe it will be found, the temporary silen- 
cing of my friend, Mr. Sumner, at the other 
end of this Capitol, who has long desired to 
speak, and the still later choking down of the 
gentleman from Connecticut, [Mr. Cleve- 
land,] on this floor, have induced me to recon- 
sider and to change my determination. 1 am 
willing to be reasoned with, and always grate- 
ful, when, for good cause. I am convinced ; but 
when an attempt is made to take from mo all 
option in regard to my exercise of a clear 
right, I find a sufficient motive for exercising 
that right in the mere act of disobedience. 

I must begin by taking a brief retrospect. 
The war against Mexico was waged to rob 
that sister Republic of her free territory, for 
the sake of widening the domain and confirm- 
ing the despotism ol slavery. On the subject 
of the robbery the country w:^ divided into 
Whigs and Democrats. On the wicked uses 
to which the territory robbed was to bo not. 
it was divided into North an 1 ^ ■'■ ■ Four- 

n out of the fiftoen. Northern States passed 

dons, most of them unanimously, or 

nearly so, in favor of excluding slavery by 

from whatever territory we n li 

South did not then ask for any 

' >n to extend slavery th< -v 

he doctrine of the great 

te North demanded Legis- 

lali Everybody at once for- 



that this question would be involved in the 
then next Presidential election. It wM re- 
markable, and certainly the 'Historian will re- 
member it. that no leading man of the South 
came out in favor of the Northern doctrine ; 
for the principles of universal liberty are |o 
congenial to the human heart, that it is diffi- 
cult to conceive of five or six millions of peo- 
ple, in any age or country of the world, with- 
out a single man among them ready to assume 
the championship bf freedom. It is still more 
remarkable that any Northern man should 
have ventured to espouse the cause of slavery. 
One. however, was found, capable of doing it 
It was strange that he should have been of 
New England lineage. It was thrice strange, 
that a man educated, enriched, honored, by a 
people who had themselves been rescued from 
all the curses of slavery, and blessed with all 
the exuberant blessings of freedom, by the Or- 
dinance of 1787. should have proposed to open 
half a continent to all the curses he and his 
people had escaped, and to shut it from all the 
blessings he and they had enjoyed. Hut such 
a man was found. General C\s S thougl 
basely of his party at the North, that he sup- 
posed he could carry them against slavery-re- 
striction. If so, then their union with the 
pro-slavery South would make a triumphant 
majority; and hence the well-known Nichol- 
son letter. But that letter recoiled upon him, 
and in the canvass »f 1848 overthrew him. 
T>. original temptation, however, still re- 
mained, and acted with increased f >rce. The 
South stood firm. They were a compact body 
of Abolitionists, though the thing they desired 
to abolish was human freedom. The si 1 
out plainly, and offered their support and their 
votes to the Northern man. Whig i 
erat, wbo would most thori ughly bend or 
-°ak himself to their purposes. Under tie 
'General Cass, many of tl I 1 



lea a 



party 



a lured, and thev 'le-erted. But 



■TTI 



M 



until the 7th of March, 1850, no Northern more, milting pro-slavery letters and speeches 
Whig yielded to their enticements. On that -wherever he went. Certainly the reason 
day, however, Mr. Webster, in the Senate of why any of the above-named parties did not 



the United States, offered to abandon the Ordi- 
nance of 1787 — then known as the "Wilmot 
Proviso/' He offered to give an additional 
slave State to Texas beyond w r hat she could 
claim under the unconstitutional resolutions 
of annexation. He offered to support, "to the 
fullest extent," that most atrocious Fugitive 
Slave bill, then before the Senate, by which all 
custom-house officers, and the seventeen thou- 



get a nomination at Baltimore, was not be- 
cause of what the law calls laches, or " want 
of reasonable diligence" on their part. 

I come now to the Baltimore Conventions 
themselves, which were held in June last. 
Every one knows that the great question of 
human slavery had a controlling influence in 
those bodies, and determined their results. 
With a vast majority of their members, pro- 



sand postmasters of the United States, were to slavery or anti-slavery was the one overmaster- 



be made judges, and to be invested with power 
over human liberty, and to have, each one of 
them, not local, but unlimited jurisdiction 
throughout the United States; and he offered 
to give $200,000,000 to fortify and perpetuate 
the institution of slavery, by removing from 



w motive and end. In the Democratic Con- 
vention, the pro-slavery sentiment was nearly 
unanimous. Its members had been sold into 
that perdition by the lust of money or the am- 
bition for office. Yet even they were held in 
check by the apprehended thunders of the 



the Southern States the dreaded element of voice of the people behind them. If they did 



the free colored population. Two hundred 
millions of dollars — a profusion and a prodi- 
gality magnificently Websterian ! I am here 
only referring to facts which, as everybody 
knows, have become history. 

Here, then, we see that two conspicuous 
leaders of the Northern Democrats and Whigs 
planted themselves upon Southern ground. 
When the race for the Presidency consisted in 
adhesion to the Slave Power alone, it was not 



not recoil from the crime, they feared its pun- 
ishment. In the Whig Convention, the men 
who were ready to sacrifice honor, duty, reli- 
gion, to the demands of slavery, were a large 
majority, and might have nominated their 
most ultra pro-slavery candidate on the first 
ballot. They could have effected this just as 
easily as they effected their pro-slavery organi- 
zation, and appointed a committee on creden- 
tials who excluded anti-slavery men, and 



to be expected that the competitors would be committee on resolutions who accepted a 



few. Mr. Buchanan forthwith caused it to 
be understood, that, on his part, he was will- 
ing to run the line of 36 deg. 30 min. — the 
Missouri Compromise line, so-called — through 
to the Pacific ocean, and surrender to slavery 
all upon its southern side. Mr. Dallas, late 
Vice President under Mr. Polk, in his letter to 
Mr. Bryan, of Texas, went further, and pro- 



Southern platform, prepared for them before- 
hand by Southern hands. But these Bel«haz- 
zars, too, like him of old, saw the handwriting 
upon the wall, aud they knew that, with such 
a candidate, they were doomed to utter and 
remorseless defeat before the people. In both 
Conventions, however, the spirit of slavery was 
so strong and so badly brave, as to carry the 



posed to incorporate the Compromise measures resolutions I am about to read. The Demo- 



and the Fugitive Slave Law itself, into the 
Constitution, so as to put their repeal beyond 
the power of a Northern majority. Senator 
Douglas followed. He sugared his pill. He 
told the South, that we have cotton lands, and 
rice lands, and tobacco lands enough ; but 
alas! said he, we want more lands for sugar; 
by which the South perfectly understood that 
if they would make him President, the annex- 
ation of Cuba should be their reward. This 
is the same gentleman who has lately said, in 
a secret session of the Senate, that if the Sand- 
wich Islands should bo annexed to this country, 
and a question should arise about excluding 



cratic Convention resolved to 

" — abide by and adhere to a faithful oxecution of 
the acts known as the Compromise measures, settled 
by the last Congress — the act for reclaiming fugitive 
slaves from service or labor included." 

And further, they 

" Resolved, That the Democratic party will resist 
all attempts at renewing, in Congress or out of it. the 
agitation of the slavery question, under whatever 
shape or color the attempt may be made." 

And the Whig Convention 

" Resolved, That the series of acts of the Thirty- 
first Congress, commonly known as the Compromise 
or adjustment, (the act for the recovery of fugitives 
from labor included,) are received and acquiesced in 



slavery from them by law. he would vote against by tu. Whi^s of the United States, as a final settle 
it During all this time affairs were ripen- m °?^ *9 P^r^w^ubsfance, of the subjects t< 
. Z , S D ,,- • mt t rm - m,. TT;il which they relate. * * " And we dom-ccnte a 

in°- for the Baltimore nominations. Mr. Fill- 
more offered to the South the Army and Navy, 
to catch a poor fugitive, where only a consta- 



ble's posse was needed. Mr. Webster trumped 
up false treasons by scores against Northern 

Anti-Slavery men. The President travel'^ ^uussuhjhoii provide a 

North and South, making speeches red'f nt °f freedom of speech or ot the part ' Why se- 

aled still cure this freedom in the organic law, if the 



to 
„ all 
further agitation of the questions thus settled, as dan- 
gerous to our peace, and will discouatonance all ef- 
forts to continue or renew such agitation, when 
wherever, or however made." 

.Now, what an outrage is this ! Does not our 
Constitution provide against ' abridging the 



pro slavery. The Secretary tr* 



tyranny of a social law can abolish it? Of what gloom and bondage of the dark ages of the 



value is that provision in the Constitution, 
which secures the free exercise of religion, if 
social intolerance and bigotry, acting in an un- 
legalized way, can destroy it ? Yet, here are 
two Conventions, utterly unknown to any of 
our Constitutions, whether State or National, 
. invested with no powers. Legislative, Judicial, 
or Executive, coming together for a day, and 
then scattered and sunk in individual obscuri- 
•• ty; yet lifting thsir pigmy voices against the 
mightiest impulses of the human heart, against 
history and providence, against the fiat and the 
Spirit of God himself; resolving that mankind 
shall be dumb in regard to the greatest of hu- 
man wrongs ; und resolving, also, that a law 
passed by a Republican Government, yet as 
barbarous and tyrannical as was ever made by 
any despotism, shall lie consecrated in its wick- 
edness, and remain eternal. 

Two Baltimore Conventions, assuming to 
quench the eternal spirit of liberty — that spirit 
which was a part of the inspiration of the 
prophets of old, when they commanded the ty- 
rants of the earth to -undo the heavy burdens 
and let the oppressed go free;" that spirit 
which gave all its heroism and splendor to the 
classic land of Greece, and made its memories 
immortal: that spirit which gave to Rome its 
colossal proportions of physical and intellectual 
grandeur; that spirit which, in the darkest 
night of the worlds history, climbed Alpine 
heights and sheltered itself in the fastnesses of 
Alpine mountains, inaccessible to tyrants; 
which, at another time, found protection with- 
in the dykes of Holland, barring out the rage 
of the ocean, and the more remorseless rage of 
despotic men : that spirit which has given to 
England, and to English history, all their un- 
disputed claims to renown and to the gratitude 
of mankind, and which, when persecuted and 
driven from England, crossed the Atlantic, 
spread itself over this open continent, and hav- 
ing been nursed by more than two hundred 
years of struggle and discipline, now bids defi- 
ance to the world — this Godlike spirit of liber- 
ty, immortal, invulnerable, and indestructible, 
two ephemeral Baltimore Conventions under- 
take to ban! Xerxes chaining the Hellespont 
was wisdom personified compared with them ; 
aye, it would be too dignified and honorable 
an illustration to compare them to two old 
male Mrs. Partingtons, mopping out the At- 
lantic! 

Why did not these insane men propose to do 
something which is at least conceivable ? Why 
did they not propose to turn back the order of 
physical events, rather than to violate the more 
infrangible and irresistible laws of moral pro- 
gress? Why did they not order the oak back 
into the acorn, or the bird back into its shell, 
or the earth itself back into its first geological 
epoch, rather than to order the enfranchised 
spirit of the niueteenth century back into the 



world ? Why did they not lift up the wand of 
their arrogance and audacity towards Arcturus 
and the Pleiades, and attempt to move round 
the constellations of the heavens as you would 
move round the hands on the dial-plate of a 
clock? Such hallucinations would be at least 
within the limits of human conception, and 
would therefore be free from the folly and 
atheism of attempting to stifle the voice of 
freemen discussing freedom. 

Sir, to resolve that the slavery question shall 
be discussed nevermore, is to resolve the mem- 
ories of all the heroes, and martyrs, and saints, 
whose names make all the bright pages of 
human history, into eternal oblivion. It is to 
resolve the history of the American Revolution. 
and of all its actors, into forgetfuhaess. It is to 
resolve the noblest faculties and aspirations of 
the human soul into non-existence. Under any 
fail and legitimate construction of such a re- 
solve, it embraces the whole meaning and force 
of that infamously celebrated decree of the 
French Convention, that -There is no God. y 
I do not say this by way of rhetorical embel- 
lishment, or to impart greater emphasis to a 
period. I say it because it is literally and 
strictly true; for the just and benevolent God 
who sits upon the throne of the Universe must 
Himself be silenced, before the cry against the 
cruelty and injustice of slavery can be quelled. 
Let us see, for a moment, what is the nature 
of the burden these Baltimore Conventions 
have taken upon themselves. By forbidding us 
to speak upon a given subject, they compel us 
to examine that subject, and see if duty does 
not require us to speak upon it. They leave us 
no option : and if the discussion shall prove un- 
palatable, they may thank themselves for pro- 
voking it. Let me inquire, then, whether it be 
not demonstrable that the relation of slavery 
between man and man comprehends, perpetu- 
ates, multiplies, and aggravates, all forms of 
crime which it is possible for a human being 
to commit. Is the stealing, even of a shilling^ 
a crime ? Slavery steals all that man can call 
his own ; and is not the whole greater than a 
part? Is robbery, which is defined to be the 
taking of any part of a man's goods, "from his 
person, or in his presence, against his will, by 
violence, or putting him in fear," a crime? 
Slavery answers the exact definition of the 
law books; for it is by violence and by putting 
in bodily fear that a master ravishes from his 
slave all his earnings, and all his ability to 
earn, from birth till death. And again, I say, 
is not the whole greater than a part ?* Is the 
destruction of any one man's house by fire a 
crime? How much greater the crime of pre- 
venting millions of men from having a house 

* President Edwards said: "While vou hold ne- 
gvoc* in slavery vou do exceeding wrong, and that in 
a highoi degree than if you committed common. job- 
bery or theft » 



they can call their own? Is concubinage a 
crime ? In this Union, all the adult portion of 
more than three millions of people are now 
forced to live in a state of concubinage. Is it 
a crime to abandon innocent females to the 
lusts of guilty men, without the slightest pro- 
tection of law ? In this country, a million and 
a half of females constantly are so abandoned, 
and the rearing of dark-skinned beauties for 
the harems of republican sultans; is a systema- 
tized and legalized business. Is it a crime to 
break asunder all the ties of human affection, 
to tear children from the arms of their parents, 
and parents from each other? There is no 
conjugal or parental or filial affection among 
more than three millions of people in this land 
which is sacred from such violation. Is it a 
crime to let murder and all other offences go 
unpunished f There is no form of crime which 
a white man may not commit against a slave 
with entire impunity, if he will take the pre- 
caution to let none but slaves witness it. The 
darkening of the intellect, the shrouding of a 
soul in the gloom of ignorance, the forbidding 
of a spirit which God made in His own image 
to commune with its Maker, is _ more than a 
common crime— it is sacrilege— it is the sacri- 
lege of sacrileges. It is a crime which no other 
nation on this earth— civilized, heathen, or 
barbarian— ever committed to the extent that 
it is committed here. And yet this locking of 
the temple of knowledge against a whole race, 
this drawing of an impenetrable veil between 
the soul of man and his Maker, this rebellion 
against all that God has done to reveal Him- 
self to His offspring through the works of na- 
ture and the revelations of His providence, is 
enacted into laws, guarded by terrible penal- 
,il»s, and administered by men who call thein- 
.' selves Christians, as though Jesus Christ could 
have subscribed or executed such laws. It is 
a crime unspeakable to deprive men Oi the 
Gospel M& of freedom to interpret it ; but the 
slave code ,does this, by withholding letters 
from the slave, and thus postpones the true 
enfranchisement and salvation of his soul to 
another life, when he can no longer be of any 
use to his earthly master. Would it be a 
crime to practice some demoniac art, by which 
the growth of body and limbs should be arrest- 
ed in childhood, and the victims should be left 
with only infantile powers to conteud with 
cold, nakedness, hunger, and all the hosts of 
min* Then it is an infinitely greater crime 
to inflict weakness and ignorance upon those 
SoriouB faculties of the mind, by which alone 
its possessor can solve the mighty problems of 
future destiny, of otermty, and ot the souls 
weal or woe/ I repeat, then, that the worst 
forms of all the crimes which a human being 
can eommit— theft, robbery, murder, adu.tevy, 
ScUt sacrilege, and whatever else Acre is 
Edicts wide-wasting ruin W* Mjeg* 
and brings the souk of men * petition tne 



word slavery is the synonym of them all. Ana- 
lyze slavery, and you will find its ingredients 
to consist of every crime. Define any crime, 
and you will find it to be incorporated in sla- 
very, and aggravated by it. 

As the complex and infinite meaning of the 
word God cannot be adequately understood, 
until you analyze it, and divide and subdivide 
it, and give to it the thousand names of om- 
nipotence, and omniscience, and omnipresence, 
of infinite justice, and holiness, and benevo- 
lence, of all sanctities, and verities, and benig- 
nities, of all energies and beauties, of all wis- 
dom and all law; so when you penetrate and 
lay open the infinite meaning of the word Sla- 
very, it resolves itself into all crimes and all 
cruelties, all debasements and all horrors. The 
telescope of the astronomer resolves the star- 
dust of the universe into refulgent systems that 
glorify their Maker ; the telescope of the mor- 
alist resolves the Tartarean cloud of slavery 
into all the impieties and wickednesses that de- 
form humanity. 

Now. between these two great antagonisms, 
between God and the Right on one side, and 
Slavery and the Wrong on the other, these two 
Baltimore Conventions have chosen the latter. 
They have said to Evil, be thou my Good, 
They have voted to annul God's laws. They 
have resolved that discussions on the great 
question of human freedom, which involves the 
whole question of free agency and human ac- 
countability, and the entire plan and order of 
the Divine government, shall be silenced. 

So much for the intrinsic nature of slavery, 
which the Baltimore Conventions have wedded 
as their bride. Now let us look at some of the 
collateral wrongs, the self-stultification and 
atheism, for which slavery in this country is 
responsible, and which those Conventions, 
therefore, have sanctioned and ratified, and de- 
clared their purpose to continue. 

When a nation is born into the world, pos- ; 
sessing the attributes and prerogatives of na- 
tionality, it is the moral duty of existing na- 
tions to welcome it into the brotherhood of the 
human family. Such recognition of a new 
sovereignty tends to increase commerce, to 
forefend war, and to diffuse the blessings of 
knowledge, science, and the arts. It becomes, 
therefore, a duty. Yet, what is the posture in 
which this Government stands to Liberia and 
Hayti? Great Britain, with France, Prussia, 
and other continental nations, has acknowl- 
edged their existence. We refuse, and stand 
aloof. And this for no other reason than to 
gratify a colorophobia, which dreads equity as 
the hydrophobia docs water. Writers on na- 
tional law call nations a moral entity. We 
find color in a moral entity, and repudiate its 
claims. Contrast the alacrity of this Govern- j 
ment in recognising slaveholding Texas, with 
its utter refusal, for a quarter of a century in 
one case, and for half a century in the other 



to recognise the Free Soil Governments of Li- 
beria and Hayti. This is one of the collateral 
wrongs growing out of the repugnance of sla- 
very to do justice to the colored man any- 
where; and the taint of this moral disease at 
the South spreads its infection over tlie North. 
Mark a great Bign and proof of depravation 
in tho public intelli ct; originating in the same 
prolific source of wrong. The Ma-;.]) 
argument has I sen put forth, that God 
ordained and instituted African slavery am 
us for the ultimate and consequential purpose 
of carrying civilization and Chribtianity 'into 
Africa. Not only have the logic of the pi !i- 
tiuian and the ethics of the moralist heen cor- 
rupted into this falsity, hut even the divine. 
with the preservative power of the Gospel of 
Jesus Christ, in Ins hands, baa endeavored to 
reconcile our people to tlie crimes and the 
curses of slavery by tins impious argument. 
They maintain that God has looked with, com- 
placency upon all the atrocities of the African 
slave trade: that the groans and agonic.- - 
Middle Passage have ascended as a sweet- 
smelling savor before His throne; that He has 
seen with approval, within the last three cen- 
turies, forty millions of native Africans — ye;-, 
sir, forty millions, for that is the estimated 
number — almost douhle the entire population 
of this country, ami more than one-third more 
than the present population of Great Britain 
and Ireland put together — of native Africans, 
torn from their homes and driven through 
gates of lire and realms of torture, to bondage 
and to death : that, during all this period. He 
has looked with delight upon the most fright- 
ful forms of war, the pillage and conflagration 
of cities, and wholesale murder, and man-steal- 
ing worse than murder, not only raging along 
the eastern and the western shores of that de- 
voted continent, but at times extending their 
ravages and havoc twelve or thirteen hundred 

miles inland; and that His benign providence and crimes of civilization rpon that bar 
is still fulfilled by the successful prosecution of stock. The sins of the white races crea 
the slave trade; though for every thousand 
human victims in Africa, it is estimated that 
only three hundred finally reach their earth- 
born hell of Cuban or Brazilian sugar or cotton 
fields. Now, that God sent out slaves from 
Africa to America, at this inconceivable cost of 
crime on the one hand, and of suffering on the 
other: that His providence has raised up hosts 
of fiends in the shape of men. century after cen- 
tury, for the roundabout purpose of carrying 
Christianity and civilization into Africa, in 
some remote age. Ave know not when: th ; s is 
the blasphemous doctrine we are made to hear 
from the political rostrum, the lecture-room, 
and. incredible to relate, from the pulpit itself] 
Now, I say. sir, that to impute any such 
cruel-heart -d and simpleton-minded scheme to 



our All-wise and benignant Father in Heaven, 
is wild and wanton impiety and blasphemy. 
No parallel can be found in heathen mythology 



where such short-sighted folly and crime have 
been charged upon any of the bloody go 
all their pantheons. The very hypothesis is 
founded on an inversion of history, and it pre- 
supposes for its conception a | erversion of the 
human intellect. 

Tho system of enslaving Africans was com- 
menced in ancient times by thi and 
tic Arabs, and carried on in later periods by 
tlie Moors. Was that fir tin- -ike of carrying 
Christianity into Africa? In modern times, 
the same system, with unspeakable aggrava- 
tions, has been prosecuted bj all the a imner- 
cial nations of Europe a' continei t. 
From time immemorial, (J Africa has 
been made the hunting ground of the man 
stealer. For thirty or forty centuries i 
and mammon have wreaked their vengeance 

upon thai devoted land. All crimes and < a- 

Iamities — conflagration, pestilence, brutality, 
and havoc — have been poured over it in crim- 
son floods. To confine our view within the last 
three centuries alone, who can a', quat< ly con- 
ceive the effects of robbing a continent of forty 
millions of people in so brief a period, with all 
the wars, devastations, cruelties, and treach- 
eries, which stand out as the terrific incidents 
of such a stupendous crime ? Nor has this 
storm of wrath expended itself upon the coasts 
alone. As I said before, these man-hunting 
forays and ravages have swept inland for 
twelve or thirteen hundred miles — further than 
from the Atlantic to the Mississippi — as far as 
from the Gulf of Mexico to the great lakes. 
Such has been the diffusive character of this 
continent-o'erwhelrning crime. And it is in 
this that we find the cause of Africa's degrada- 
tion, not the hopes of her redemption. The 
white man has created the very barbarism 
which he now impiously uses before Heaven as 
an excuse for the crime of creating it. Foreign 
intercourse engrafted the full-developed vices 

bariaq 
eated the 
very necessity for that civilization, which, as 
they now profanely contend, the further sin of 
slavery is to supply. The cause of African 
barbarism was slavery; and, according to the 
argument, the remedy is slavey. Tho white 
man clutches the profits, while be throws off 
the wickedness upon God. But what kind of 
a God does he give to the black man. who suf- 
fers equally from both disease and remedy? 

Mr. MASON. 1 desire to ask the gentleman 
from Massachusetts a single question. I wish 
to call his attention to the fact, which I learn 
from the history of the race, that the three mil- 
lions of negroes in the United States, who are 
slaves, are in a hetter condition, physically and 
morally, than any three millions of the African 
race that have existed since we have any au- 
thentic accounts of them. I ask the gentleman 
whether he does not consider the improve- 
ment in the moral and physical condition of 



these negroes sufficient to counter! >alance the 
evils which necessarily grow out of the institu- 
tion of slavery? 

Mr. MANN. That is a fair question, and I 
am ready to answer it. According to the laws 
of population, which govern barbarous nations, 
Africa has as many inhabitants now, as it 
would have if the robber had never invaded her 
domain, and stolen away her children. Among 
barbarous tribes, the population presses upon 
the means of subsistence. It tends toincrease 
faster than the means of subsistence increase. 
Remove a part of the great family from the 
table whence they are supplied, and their va- 
cant places will be soon filled by others, ac- 
cording to the laws of natural increase. As to 
them, the Malthusian theory holds good. 
Therefore we have not diminished the number 
of suffering, degraded, and demoralized beings 
in Africa, by one unit, in consequence of taking 
a portion of their ancestors from them. 

Mr. MASON. What would have been the 
condition of these three millions of negroes, had 
not their ancestors been brought to this coun- 
try ? Would they not, by degradation and 
starvation, have gone out of existence ? 

Mr. MANN. They would never have come 
into existence ; but their places amongst u8 
would have been occupied by a white popula- 
tion of our own race, or of some race kindred 
to our own. Other men would have been sub- 
stituted for them — whites for blacks, freemen 
for slaves. 

Mr. MASON. Are not our slaves better off, 
both morally and physically, than any three 
millions of negroes ever were in Africa? 

Mr. MANN. Before the gentleman insti- 
tutes a comparison between the moral and 
physical condition of the black race here and 
in Africa, he must see what has caused their 
degradation at home. Remember the awful 
facts that forty millions of the best of them — 
selected men and women — within the last three 
centuries, have been torn from home, and that 
these ravages have not been confined to the 
eastern and western shores, but have pierced 
inland; so that the country has bled at every 
pore — at every vital organ — and conceive, if 
mortal imagination can conceive, what effect 
this of itself must have in making and keeping 
a people barbarian. And, after all, what has 
been the social condition of the interior tribes, 
who have had less communication and been 
less corrupted by the 'lower law''' nations? 
Travellers inform us that, generally speaking, 
they are a mild, docile, peaceable people — nut 
aggressive and predatory, land-robbing and 
man-hunting, like the British in India, or our- 
selves on this continent. They are contented, 
companionable, home-loving, and unwarlike. 
Some of the early Christian Fathers, as the 
gentleman must well know, were Africans; 
and there is every reason to believe that Chris- 
tianity would have spread southward from the 



Mediterranean into Africa, quite as fast as 
northward into Europe, and would even have 
encountered less opposition from the stern and 
unyielding nature of the people, but for the de- 
moralizing elements injected through every 
vein and artery of their system by the stronger 
nations of the earth. 

Mr. MASON. I think the gentleman might 
give many other reasons than the one which 
he has named, why the Africans have not be- 
come more civilized. I think he might find 
reasons for it in the history of that race for the 
last thousand years, and in the history of the 
missionaries who have gone amongst them. 
The Catholics have been there for several hun- 
dred years, and have established churches, but 
have always abandoned them; although I see 
by the last reports that they are trying it 
again. I think the gentleman could find a rea- 
son for it in the nature of the black man, as 
made by his Creator. He is not capable or 
susceptible of any of these qualifications in any 
Vher state than in a state of slavery. The 
three millions who have been reduced to sla- 
very in this country have been placed in a bet- 
ter condition than any of the race have been 
known to exist in. The gentleman admits that 
fact. 

Mr. MANN. Has the gentleman read Dr. 
Shaw's Travels in Africa ? 

Mr. MASON. I have read some extracts 
from Dr. Shaw's Travels. 

Mr. MANN. Dr. Shaw relates the manner 
in which the western Moors of Africa had 
traded, "from time immemorial, 7 ' as he says, 
with the native tribes on the banks of the 
Niger, without ever having violated the charter 
which prescribed the mode of traffic : 

" At a certain time of the year," says Dr. Shaw, 
" they [the Moors] make this journey in a numerous 
caravan, carrying along with them coral and glass 
beads, bracelets of horn, knives, scissors, and such 
like trinkets. When they arrive at the place appoint- 
ed, which is on such a day of the moon, they find in 
the evening several different heaps of gold dust, lying 
at a small distance from each other, against which 
the Moors place so many of their trinkets as they 
judge will be taken in exchange for them. If tho 
Nigritians the next morning approve of the bargain, 
they take up the trinkets and leave the gold dust, or 
else make some deduction from the latter. In this 
manner they transact their exchange, without seeing 
one another, or without the least instance of dishon- 
esty or perfidiousness on either side.'"* 

Now, contrast this picture with the honesty 
of the black men in this country, or of the 
white men either. Contrast it with the fact of 
our infinite mercantile frauds, from the forgery 
of custom-house invoices, through adulteration 
and false weights and false measures, down to 
the shower of lies which is so often rained upon 
his goods by the last retailer, affirming them 
to be what he knows they are not, and make 



* Travels and Observations rein ting to several parts 
of Barbary and the Levant. Dr. Shaw was English 
chaplain at Algiers in the reign of George I. 



your own comparisons as to what the race is 
here, and what it might have been, but for 
man-stealing, there. 

Mr. MASON. The gentleman must not un- 
derstand me as being an enemy of the African 
race; but I look upon them as being an entire- 
ly different people. If the effect of civilization 
is to make men dishonest, we had better not 
try to civilize the Africans. 

Mr. MANN._ And now_, as the argument is 
that God ordained American slavery as the 
means of civilizing and Christianizing Africa, 
let us see what kind and style of civilization 
and Christianity it is which our example prof- 
fers them. The most conspicuous features in 
the civilization of this country are, that it holds 
more than three millions of human beings in 
ruthless bondage ; that the spirit which governs 
the country has lately annexed slaveholding 
Texas, because it was slaveholding: that it has 
despoiled Mexico of her richest provinces, in 
the hope of making them slaveholding also; 
that it has attempted to rob Spain of Cuba, 
and still means to do it; that two millions of 
our white children are growing up without 
schools; that intemperance is a common vice 
among the people, and not an uncommon one 
among rulers; and that, in our cities, the rich 
and the strong live upon the poor and the 
weak, almost as much as in the waters on 
which they are situated, the great fishes eat up 
the little ones. When some one asked John 
Jacob Astor how so many men found business 
in the city of New York, his reply was. "They 
cheats one another, and they calls that busi- 
ness.'- The wealthy have more houses than 
they can live in. the costliest furniture, ward- 
robes, equipages, libraries, and all that art or 
nature can produce; while thousands of the 
children of the same Heavenly Father, around 
them, are houseless and shelterless, naked and 
hungry. Such is the type of the civilization 
which our example proffers to Africa. 

And how do our " lower law" apologists for 
slavery dispose of the American coastwise 
slave trade among the facts of their impious 
argument? In 1820, Virginia had a slave 
population 425,153. According to the ratio of 
increase in the whole slave population of the 
United States, her slaves, in 1850, should have 
amounted to 800,000. But the actual number 
was only 472.528; that is, more than 300,000 
less than the proportionate natural increase. 
This number, or at least most of them, must 
have been sent to the South for sale. 

In 1833, Professor Dew, of William and 
Mary College said that Virginia exported her 
own native population, at the rate of 6.000, for 
whu'eh she received $1,200,000. annually. 

So in 1820, the slave population of Maryland 
was 107.398. Making all due abatements for 
manumissions and escapes, this number should 
have increased, in thirty years, to nearly 
200,000. But in 1850 it was only 90,368. The 



difference has gone to the remorseless South. 
And doubtless, in most of these cases, members 
of families have been torn asunder — man from 
woman, parents from children. 

The same slave trade is carried on from 
North Carolina. The slaves are borne from 
the less rigorous bondage of the Northern 
slave States, to a more unrelenting prison- 
house. Is this also in furtherance of God's 
gracious purpose of spreading Christianity and 
civilization over Africa ? 

Our Christianity secures the Trial by Jury, 
and the Great Writ of Freedom, to ourselves, 
but disfranchises and outlaws, and puts beyond 
the pale of human sympathy, an entire race of 
a different color. But when have we sent to 
Africa a colony of Americans to teach them 
the arts? When a Las Casas to teach them 
Christianity? The missionaries we have sent 
them have been rum and fire-arms. The arts 
we have taught them have been those of 
treachery and man stealing. In what we took, 
and in what we gave, we inflicted upon them 
a double curse. And yet Doctors of Divinity 
and political aspirants dare tell us that God 
looked down through the vista of the ages, and, 
seeing this frightful form of civilization afar 
off, with all its attendant ministers of ven- 
geance, and woe, and death, bade the gory 
demon advance ! 

Mr. POLK, (interrupting.) I ask the gentle- 
man from Massachusetts to paint me the con- 
dition of the black race in the non-slaveholdine: 
States. 

Mr. MANN. At the proper time I will at- 
tend to that subject. It does not belong to my 
present course of argument. 

Mr. POLK. I insist upon it now. sir. 

[Loud cries of "Order!" "Order!"] 

Mr. MANN. If the gentleman will show 
me what right he has to insist upon it, I will 
obey him ; but not until he does. 

Mr. POLK. I consider the attack which 
the gentleman is making upon the South as 
unworthy of a member upon this floor. 

[Renewed cries of " Order ! "] 

Mr. MANN. The gentleman from Tennes- 
see must not, in the first place, forbid our dis- 
cussing the subject of slavery 

Mr. POLK. I forbid nothing but slanders 
upon the institutions of the South. 

[Shouts of "Order!"] 

Mr. MANX. And then, when we get a 
chance to discuss it, undertake to determine 
upon what topics discussion shall be had. 

Mr. POLK. I say that a gentleman upon 
this floor has no right to perpetrate such vile 
slanders upon the South, when he does not hold 
himself personally responsible 

[Loud shouts of " Order ! "] 

The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from 
Tennessee is out of order, and must take his 
seat. 

Mr. HARRIS, of Alabama. I rise to a ques- 



tion of order, and I wish to have the question 
decided. The gentleman from Massachusetts 
has now been, for the last three quarters of an 
hour, assailing the established institutions of 
one half of this Union — existing institutions, 
existing under the Constitution of the United 
States. I ask if that be in order? I call him 
to order upon the ground that it is not in order, 
and I want the question decided by the Chair. 
The CHAIRMAN. The Chair will state that 
the latitude of debate upon these bills is very 

great, and it is very difficult indeed 

Mr. POLK, (interrupting ) I would ask the 
Chair one other question. Is it right that the 
gentleman from Massachusetts should assail 
an institution of the South, with which we are 
all connected, in a manner that is insulting in 
its character, when he does not hold himself 
responsible for his insults? 

Mr. FOWLER. I rise to another question 
of order. My question of order is this, that 
when the gentleman from Massachusetts is 
using his privilege, he shall be allowed to go 
on, and that this House shall sustain the Chair 
in allowing him to go forward with his re- 
marks. 

The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from 
Massachusetts [Mr. Mann] will proceed. 

Mr. POLK. He has no right to state false- 
hoods about one-half of the nation 

[Shouts of ' ; Order!'"'] 

Mr. MEADE. I call for the reading of the 
31st rule. 

Mr. JOHN W. HOWE. I call for the read- 
ing of the two platforms. [Great Laughter.] 

The CHAIRMAN. The Chair has decided 
that the gentleman from Massachusetts ia in 
order, and he will proceed. 

Mr. MEADE. The 31st rule prohibits all 
discussion of this question in this House, except 
upon a proposition to which it is germane. I 
ask for the reading of that rule. 

The CHAIRMAN. The Chair has already 
decided that the gentleman from Massachu- 
setts is not out of order, in pursuing this course 
of remark. If that decision is not satisfactory, 
the Chair trusts some gentleman will appeal 
from it. 

Mr. HARRIS, of Alabama. I appeal from 
that decision. 

Mr. CAMPBELL, of Ohio. Very well. Let 
us try it on the question of order presented by 
those who have been in the habit of dragging 
evei-y possible question into debate here. We 
will see whether there are not other places in 
this country besides Tennessee — other parts of 
the Union besides the South. 

Mr. POLK. I take that responsibility, and 
appeal from the decision of the Chair. 1 hold 
the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Campbell] 
equally responsible; and I pronounce him the 
same vile slanderer as the gentleman from 
Massachusetts, who makes these charges. j 
[Cries of "Order!"] 



The 31st rule was then read by the Clerk as 
follows : 

"When any member is about to speak in debate, 
or deliver any matter to the House, he shall rise from 
his seat, and respectfully address himself to ' Mr. 
Speaker,' and shall confine himself to the question 
under debate, and avoid personality." 

Mr. MANN continued : Mr. Chairman, for 
myself, I do not regret this interruption. But 
I did not think it possible, even after the Balti- 
more edict had gone forth, even after a Sena- 
tor had been silenced at the other end of the 
Capitol [Mr. Sumner,] and also a Representa- 
tive on this floor, [Mr. Cleveland.] because 
they proposed to speak on the subject of slave- 
ry—I did not think it possible, when I was in 
the legitimate course of making a speech, and 
was rightfully entitled to the floor, and was in 
order, that a dozen men should start up here, 
so hostile to hearing the words of truth _ and 
soberness, when spoken in relation to the insti- 
tute of slavery, as to try to gag me down. 

I had spoken of the cause of Africa's demor- 
alization and barbarism. I had spoken of the 
type of civilization which it is proposed to offer 
her as an example, and I had shown how im- 
pious was the argument which would attribute 
to the All-good and the All-powerful, such a 
tardy, cruel, circuitous method of effecting her 
regeneration ; and which, after waiting through 
slow centuries of agony and crime, would send 
her such a civilization by such messengers ! I 
have only to add, that before 1 would accept 
any such theology as this, I would seek my 
creed among the old mythologies of the hea- 
then. In this hideous doctrine, which slavery 
has now forced upon that public intellect which 
it had before depraved, there is material suffi- 
cient for eight anti " Bridgewater Treatises,'' 
all dw-proving the wisdom, the power, and the 
goodness of God. 

Another obvious consequence of the exist- 
ence of slavery in this country, has been the 
criminal remissness of the Government in^ sup- 
pressing the slave trade on the coast of Africa. 
We have refused to enter into treaties with 
European Governments to secure so desirable 
an end; and authentic documents, developing 
the horrors of this traffic, and proving Ameri- 
can-built merchant ships to be engaged in it, 
have laid on the files of the State Department 
for years, and through whole Presidential 
terms, unnoticed. On such an appalling crime 
as this, whose suppression has been within our 
reach, the national conscience has been be- 
numbed into torpidity and paralysis, by the ex* 
istence of slavery amongst us. 

Look at another instance in which slavery 
has depraved the popular sentiment of the 
country. Under the generous and chivalnc 
lead of Mr. Clay, with what enthusiasm did 
we hail the birth of the South American Re- 
publics ! What hosannas did we shout forth 
for the emancipation of Greece! How deep 



g 



the sigh of the nation's heart when Poland 
struggled in her death-agony and breathed her 
last! Even so late as 1848, this Congress sent 
resolutions congratulating France on her Mag- 
na Charta of "liberty, equality, and fraternity.*' 
[n one of the European revolutions of that year, 
on the banks of the Danube, a young man 
sprang, at a single bound, from comparative 
obscurity to universal fame. His heroism or- 
ganized armies. His genius created resources. 
He abolished the factitious order of nobility, 
but his exalted soul poured the celestial ichor 
of the gods through ten millions of peasant 
hearts, and made them truly noble. Though 
weak in all but the energies of the soul, yet it 
took two mighty empires to break down bis 
power. When he sought refuge in Turkey, 
the sympathies of the civilized world attended 
his exile. He was invited to ouv shores. He 
came, and spoke as man never before spake. 
It was Byron's wish that he could condense all 
the raging elements of his soul 

'' into one. word, 
And that one word were lightning." 

Kossuth found what Byron in vain prayed for, 
for all his words were lightning; not bolts, but 
a lambent flame, which he poured into men's 
hearts — not to kill, but to animate with a more 
exalted and a diviner life. In cities where the 
vast population went forth to hail him, in aca- 
demic halls, where the cultivation of eloquence 
and knowledge is made the business of life : in 
those great gathering places, where the rivers 
of people have their confluence, he was address- 
ed by the most eloquent men whom this nation 
of orators could select. More than five hun- 
dred of our selectest speakers spoke speeches 
before him which they had laboriously prepar- 
ed from history and embellished from the poets, 
with severe toil, by the long-trimmed lamp. 
Save in two or three peculiar cases, his unpre- 
pared and improvised replies, in eloquence, in 
pathos, in dignity, in exalted sentiment, excel- 
led them all. For their most profound philoso- 
phy, he gave them deeper generalizations; he 
out-circuited their widest ranges of thought, 
and in the whole sweep of the horizon revealed 
glories they had never seen ; and while they 
checked their ambitious flight beneath the sun, 
he soared into the empyrean, and brought down, 
for the guidance of men's hearts and deeds, the 
holy light that shines from the face of God. 
Though all their splendors were gathered to a 
focal point, they were outshone by his efful- 
gence. His immortal theme was Liberty — 
liberty for the nations, liberty for the people. 
Once that word was enough to electrify men's 
hearts, aye, to make the stones in the streets cry 
out for joy. But, by the compromises of 1850, 
and this infernal Slave Law, and the efforts of 
political leaders and parties to sustain them, the 
people had been demoralized; their sentiments 
had been debauched. To thousands and hun- 
dreds of" thousands the cry of the rights of man 
had become an odious cry. To hail liberty in 



the East, while wo were propagating slavery 
in the West; to receive with honors a fugitive 
from Austrian bondage, while our bands were 
thrusting back fugitives into a tenfold direr 
bondage at the South, were contradictions so 
palpable and flagrant that even partisan blind- 
ness could not but see them. Kossuth owed 
labor and service to Francis Joseph of Austria, 
just as much as Thomas Sims owed it to John 
Potter of 'Georgia. Why should the one be 
cheered and the other chained? Why should 
the Mississippi bring Kossuth here for free- 
dom, and the Acorn carry Sims back to bond- 
age? Kossuth had committed treason, ten 
thousand times over, against the House of Haps- 
burg. Why should he be sheltered in our 
arms from the penalties of treason, while the 
Government here sets all the foul ministers of 
the law to make constructive treasons for the 
punishment of innocent men ? Kossuth had re- 
belled against Austria, and had caused the 
death of tens of thousands of her subjects. 
Why should he be screened behind a rampart 
of American hearts, while those who killed 
Gorsuch, under the law of self-preservation, and 
in defence of life, liberty, and home, should be 
ignominiously hung on the gallows? These 
were questions that no deafness could avoid 
hearing, and, when heard, no sophistry could 
answer. Freedom is one, slavery is its antipode, 
and therefore the protection of the fugitive Kos- 
suth and the surrender of the fugitive slave 
could never be reconciled. Hence it was that, 
in public assemblies, among public men, 
throughout the newspaper press, wherever the 
spirit of slavery predominated, there Kossuth 
was denounced. I say, among public men. 
Accuracy directs me to add, that, among our 
public men, there were a few honorable excep- 
tions, of which Mr. Webster was one. But, as 
to the newspapers, if you saw one to-day, filled 
with the veriest servility towards the slave 
power, you might be sure that it would revile 
and defame Kossuth to-morrow. Or, if you 
saw one column reeking with abuse of Kos- 
suth, you would be sure to find a pro-slavery 
pasan in the next. Even at the door of this 
House, after Kossuth had been invited to the 
Capitol, he was stopped and insulted. Some 
of the more simple ones avowed their reasons. 
They said, if we sympathize with the oppress- 
ed in the person of a Hungarian now, we may 
next be called upon to sympathize with the op- 
pressed in the persons of three millions of Af- 
ricans. Compare the triumphal ' ; Progress" of 
Kossuth through the free States, such as no Ro- 
man consul, returning from foreign conquests 
and laden with spoils, ever knew, with the fee- 
ble, and grudged, and stinted honors paid him 
in the land of bondage. Slavery made the 
contrast. Almost without exception, the North- 
ern opponents of Kossuth were sympathizers 
with Southern slavery, and therefore with 
Francis Joseph and Nicholas. 
The person of this truly noftle Hungarian 



10 



has departed from our shores; but he has left a 
spirit behind him that will never die. He has 
scattered seeds of liberty and truth, whose flow- 
ers and fruit will become honors and glories 
amaranthine. I trust he goes to mingle in 
sterner scenes; I trust he goes to battle for the 
right, not with the tongue and pen alone, but 
with all the weapons that freedom can forge 
and wield. Before the Divine Government J 
bow in reverence and adoration; but it tasks 
all my philosophy and all my religion to be- 
lieve that the despots of Europe have not ex- 
ercised their irresponsible and cruel tyrannies 
too long. It seems too long since Charles was 
brought to the axe, and Louis to the guillotine. 
Liberty, humanity, justice, demand more mod- 
ern instances. The time has fully come when 
the despot, not the patriot, should feel the ex- 
ecutioner's steel or lead. The 'time has fully 
come when, if the oppressed demand their in- 
alienable and Heaven-born rights of their op- 
pressors, and this demand is denied, that they, 
should say, not exactly in the language of Pat- 
rick Henry, " Give me liberty or give me 
death;" that was noble language in its day, 
but we have now reached an advanced stage 
in human development, and the time has fully 
come when the oppressed, if their rights are 
forcibly denied them, should say to the oppres- 
sor : " Give me liberty, or I will give you death ! " 

I have said that one of the collateral conse- 
quences of slavery in this country has been to 
deprave, corrupt, and debauch public senti- 
ment. When, before, in the history of the world, 
has it ever happened that the leading men of 
a Republic, and the leading organs of public 
sentiment supported by their wealth, have be- 
come abettors and champions of slavery? Yet 
such is the morally hideous spectacle our coun- 
try now exhibits. 

When, before, in the history of the world, 
have the most influential minds in the commu- 
nity labored and striven to blot out, theoreti- 
cally and practically, the ineffaceable distinc- 
tion between a man and a brute, between a 
human soul and an inanimate chattel, to plant 
and enroot in our civil polity a vast, expanding 
system, in which conscience, reason, the capa- 
cities of religion, and the inborn convictions of 
accountability and immortality are made sub- 
servient and secondary to bones and muscles, 
and put upon auction blocks as incidents to 
the body that perisheth ? When, before, in 
all our history, have men of eloquence and 
power ever traversed the country, and scatter- 
ed letters and speeches, like the flakes of a 
snow-storm, to subdue and harmonize the pub- 
lic mind to such stupendous wrongs ? When, 
before, since the May-Flower crossed the ocean 
with her precious burden, has any one minis- 
ter of the Puritan stock ever dared or ever 
desired to put on priestly robes and enter the 
house of God, to defend slavery, or to palliate 
it?^ Sir, such things were never known before. 
It is a new spectacle for men and angels. It 



must give a new joy in the world of darkness. 

Another collateral effect which slavery has 
produced, is the promulgation from the Halls 
of Congress, and also from — what, in such cases, 
is not the sacred, but the profane desk — that 
there is no " Higher Law" than the Constitu- 
tion, or than any interpretation which any cor- 
rupt Congress may put upon it. Such a doc- 
trine is nothing less than palpable and flagrant 
atheism. If 1 am bound to obey any human 
law or Constitution, as my paramount rule of 
duty, thenceforth that rule becomes my supreme 
arbiter, judge, and god ; and I am compelled, 
by logical necessity, to abjure, renounce, and 
depose all others. There cannot be two su- 
preme rules of right. If I acknowledge my- 
self bound by the divine law, and that comes 
in conflict with the human law, then I must 
disobey the latter. But if the human law be 
the Higher Law, and if it conflicts with God's 
law, then I am bound to disobey the law of 
God. If the Constitution be the " Higher Law," 
then we, on taking our seats in this House, and 
all magistrates and legislators, when entering 
upon the duties of their respective offices, ought 
not to take an oath before God to support the 
Constitution, but ought to swear by the Consti- 
tution to support that first, and God after- 
wards ; provided it is convenient. I say, then, 
that this doctrine — which is one of the off- 
shoots of slavery — that there is no higher la y w 
than the law of the State, is palpable and prac- 
tical atheism. And yet it is perfectly well 
known to all who hear me, and to all who fre- 
quent the purlieus of Congress, that there is no 
butt of ridicule so common here, nothing which 
so readily and so frequently raises the "loud 
laugh that speaks the vacant mind," as a fling 
or jeer at the " higher law." 

Sir, it is of fearful omen, when the laws of 
men are made, even in theory, to take prece- 
dence and override the laws of God. And the 
last aggravation is added to this iniquity, when 
the politician disguises himself beneath the 
garb of a priest, and cloaks his wickedness un- 
der the show of religion. 

No person feels a profounder reverence, or 
would pay a sincerer homage to a godly, sin- 
avoiding, sin-exposing priesthood, than myself. 
But I have no adequate words to express my 
abhorrence for the clerical hypocrite, with 
whom religion is neither a sanctification of the 
soul, nor a purification of the body, but only a 
kind of policy of insurance against the retribu- 
tion in another world for sins committed in 
this, accompanied all the while by knavish 
tricks on the part of the insured to cheat the 
Divine Insurer out of his premium. 

Mr. SUTHERLAND. I ask the gentleman 
from Massachusetts whether it is possible that 
the higher law of God can come in conflict 
with the Constitution 1 

Mr. MANN. I think it would be better to 
ask whether the Constitution comes in conflict 
with the higher law. 



11 



Mr. SUTHERLAND. I ask the gentleman 
if every American citizen does not obey the 
higher law of God when he obeys every part of 
the Constitution ? And can any good result 
come from discussing these immaterial abstrac- 
tions ? Is not the spirit of the Constitution in 
accordance with the higher law ? Can you 
point to a clause in the Constitution which, 
when fulfilling to the best of my ability, would 
make me violate the higher law of God? 

Mr. MANN. That is not to the point. 

Mr. SUTHERLAND. It is the very point. 
You and others — I say it with all possible re- 
spect — disturb the harmony of this House and 
the country by trying to get up issues upon ab- 
stract questions of morality, which have noth- 
ing whatever to do with the proceedings of this 
House, or with correct public sentiment. If I 
should undertake to make an issue between 
you and me upon the subject of slavery, it 
would be wrong. Yet you get up here and at- 
tempt to make this issue before the country. 
You get up an issue upon an immaterial ques- 
tion of morality, which simply tends to excite 
men without any practical benefit. 

Mr. MANN. I hope the gentleman will not 
interrupt me further. His argument would 
have answered just as well in the time of 
Herod, the Tetrarch, when he issued the order 
for the murder of all the children under two 
years of age. The murderers doubtless got ten- 
dollar commissioner fees for the deed. So those 
who massacred thirty-six thousand Protestants, 
on St. Bartholomew's day, at the ringing of a 
signal-bell, went by the " Higher Law" of the 
Pope, or of his vice-gerent, the King ; and had 
not they their " Union " to save by if? And 
our Pilgrim Fathers were driven into exile by 
the " Higher Law " of a hierarchical Parlia- 
ment. And so if you admit this doctrine, there 
is no enormity, actual or conceivable, which 
may not be perpetrated and justified under it. 

The gentleman says I am discussing " imma- 
terial abstractions," and raising issues that 
have no practical bearing. Is the Fugitive 
Slave Law an "immaterial abstraction?" a 
law which violates both the divine law and the 
Constitution of the country. Ask the free man, 
Gibson, who was sent into bondage under it 
when as much entitled to his liberty as you or 
I, whether that law has not some bearing on a 
practical question. Are not the Baltimore 
edicts before the country ? And have they no 
practical bearing, when their very purpose is 
to suppress free speech; and when that pur- 
pose has been executed again and again — and 
the attempt has been made here, within the 
last half hour, upon me, to enforce it? 

Now, sir, I do not believe in preaching against 
theoretical and distant sins, and letting real 
and present ones escape. I do not believe in 
denouncing Hindoo suttees, because they are 
on the other side of the globe, and defending 
the extension of slavery in our own land. That 
sin has the beguiling defence of office and prof- 



its not less than ours. But that sin destroys 
only the body ; ours the soul. The modern 
clergymen of the u lower law " school can se- 
lect some monster of the Old Testament — Da- 
rius, Nebuchadnezzar, or Jeroboam — and hold 
them up for execration, while they suffer the 
greater moral monsters of their own parishes 
to escape with impunity. They have no mercy 
for Jeroboam, old hunker though he was, lie- 
cause he " drove Israel from following the 
Lord," more especially as there was noonu 
for the Presidency, nor any tariff, nor sale of 
dry goods to tho South, to tempt him. But they 
forget that each and all of the worst sinners 
whose names blacken the page of history had 
their accompanying temptations, and their 
uistry for self-defence, just as much as the of- 
fenders of our day. They forget that when 
posterity looks backwards upon great crimes, 
as they stand out in historic relief, they are 
seen in their foul nakedness and deformity, and 
without any of the palliations or pretexts by 
which their wickedness was softened to the 
tempted eye of the perpetrator. They forget 
that it will be as true of the crimes of our day, 
as of ancient ones, when the evanescent cir- 
cumstances of the seduction have passed by — 
that then they, too, will stand out in the fore- 
ground of the historic canvass, in their full pro- 
portions, and in their native deformity, hideous, 
unmitigated, and execrable. Had not Ananias 
and Sapphira a temptation every whit as strong 
to keep back from the apostles a part of the 
price of their possessions, as though they had 
been offered a sinecure chaplaincy in the Navy 
for defending the Fugitive Slave Law ? We 
have historic proof that Benedict Arnold at- 
tempted to justify his treason, on the ground 
that he was seeking the best good of the colo- 
nies, just as his followers in our times seek to 
justify themselves by the far less plausible plea 
of saving the Union. 

I know it is said, that if the doctrine of the 
"Higher Law" is admitted, all laws will beset 
at naught, and civil Government be overthrown. 
All history refutes this ; for, of all the men who 
have ever lived, those who contend for the 
higher law of God have universally been the 
most faithful and obedient, when human laws 
were coincident with the divine. That identi- 
cal principle in our nature, which makes us 
true to the will of God, makes us also true to 
all the just commands of men.* 



* What is the following fling at tho " Higher Law," 
hut explicit atheism : 

" When nothing else will answer, they invoke re- 
ligion, and speak of a higher law. Gentlemen, this 
North mountain is high, the Bluo Ridge higher still, 
the Allegany higher than either, and yet this higher 
law ranges further than an cagle"s flight above tho 
highest peaks of the Allegany. [Laughter.] No com- 
ono)i vision can discern it, no conscience vot trans- 
cendental and ecstatic can feel it, the hearing of com- 
mon men never learns tts high behests ; and therefore 
one should think it is not a safe law to be acted on 
in matters of tho highest practical moment. It is tho 



12 



Another consequennce of most evil portent 
has grown out of the late political enthusiasm 
for slavery : I mean a false interpretation of 
the law of treason. Sir, you know, and we 
all know, that under the bloody reigns of Brit- 
ish tyrants, treason by construction was the 
great engine of political and personal ven- 
geance. Under the old doctrine of construct- 
ive treason, if living lips dared to preach the 
gospel of freedom, they were foreed to preach 
the doctrine of abject submission to ungodly 
laws; for the heads they belonged to were 
decapitated and borne on soldiers' pikes through 
the streets of cities, and hung up to fester and 
rot at all the city gates. I could occupy the 
day with the recital of instances, where the 
purest innocence and the noblest virtues fell a 
sacrifice to a forced and arbitrary construction 
of the law of treason. Having lately looked 
through those English cases, I now declare 
that they were not one whit a greater outrage 
upon the English law, than was Judge Kane's 
charge to the grand jury in the Christiana 
cases. Both had in view the same object, to 
put down agitation for freedom, and Lord Jef- 
fries's expositions were as plausible as Judge 
Kane's. 

To exclude all possibility of constructive 
treason, under our Constitution, its framers de- 
fined that offence in the following words: 

"Treason against the United States shall consist 
only in levying war against them ; or in adhering 
to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." 

Judge Kane says, that whatever would make 
a man an accessory to the crime, in any other 
felony, makes him a principal in this ; when 
the very intent of the new definition, in our 
Constitution, was so far to abrogate the Eng- 
lish law. The emphatic word only, in our 
definition, expressly excludes the accessory. It 
is only the man who levies the war, or the man 
who adheres to the enemies of the country, 
who is, or, under our Constitution, can be a 
traitor. The other interpretation opens the 
door to all the constructive treasons known to 
the worst days of English judicial tyranny — 
the very door which the framers of our Con- 
Btitution intended to lock and double-lock and 
fasten impregnably. 

And again : The doctrine of accessories and 
the relation of accessories to principals, was a 
part of the English common law. That com- 
mon law these United States never adopted, 
as has been decided again and again, and 
therefore there can be no accessories in trea- 
son, by construction. 

And besides all this, the seventh section of 
the Fugitive Slave Law provides a penalty for 
every act which a man can commit in assisting 
the escape of a slave; so that, if any such act 
were treason before, it is no longer so ; for no 
legal principle is better settled than that when 

code, however, of the fanatical and factious Aboli- 
tionists of the North." — Daniel Webster's speech at 
Capon ( Virginia) Spri7?gs, Jtair, 1851. 



a subsequent statute reduces the penalty provi- 
ded in a previous one, the previous actds so far 
repealed, even without any repealing words. 
On any ground, therefore, the charge of Judge 
Kane is only inferior in monstrousness to the 
law whose inherent atrocity he sought to ag- 
gravate. 

A similar attempt to' create constructive trea- 
son was made in the Syracuse cases; but the 
air of Western New York being more electric 
with freedom, had a salutary effect upon the 
health of the Court. Would to Heaven that 
these healthful breezes of the country could 
reach and sweep away the judicial miasma 
that stagnates upon our Atlantic cities. 

The district attorney at Syracuse, having 
rendered himself obnoxious by the inordinate 
zeal with which he pursued the suspected- in 
the rescue cases at that city, I was glad to see 
it stated in the newspapers that the ladies of 
the place had a meeting, and sent him a pres- 
ent of thirty pieces of silver. They were three- 
cent pieces, however — ninety cents in the 
whole ! The ancient Judas got larger pieces. 
Such,, however, is now the rivalry to fill his 
place, that the competitors must content them- 
selves with smaller coin. 

It was said, also, that when Jerry, the al- 
leged fugitive in that case, reached her Majes- 
ty's dominions, he put the irons with which he 
had been " dressed " into a nice box, and sent 
them to President Fillmore. When the signer 
of the Fugitive Slave Law unboxed these irons, 
and unwrapped them, and first took in the full 
significance of their meaning, it must have 
presented a scene worthy the highest art of 
the historic painter! I trust it so happened 
that they were received and opened at a Cabi- 
net meeting ! 

And under this prolific head of the collate- 
ral consequences of slavery, I say again, and 
finally, where else, since the light of the Chris- 
tian era first dawned upon the world, has it 
ever been known that the leading men of a 
young Republic espoused the side of slavery ? 
It is unnatural as parricide. Look at the Re- 
publics of Switzerland, or at the States Gene- 
ral of Holland. Look at France at the period 
of the great Revolution, when in her maddened 
throes for liberty, after fifteen centuries of op- 
pression, one of her first acts was the recogni- 
tion of the natural and universal freedom of 
man. Look at the South American Republics, 
composed as they mainly were of Catholics, 
who for ages had been inured to bodily and 
mental thraldom, and amongst whom slavery 
was an existing institution, as it was here when 
our Declaration of Independence was promul- 
gated, yet by a noble act of moral heroism 
they cast the incubus away. Yes, I rdpeat, 
ours is the first Republic since Christ died for 
men, whose leaders have disowned and deserted 
the principles of their Go' £ nment, and be- 
come the willing champions of the most re- 
morseless of deepotiems. 



13 



Sir, I may as well remark here as anywhere, 
in order to make any honest misconstruction 
of my views impossible, that when 1 speak of 

the all-comprehending wickeness of slavery 

when I say that it is in relation to the wrongs 
and crimes of men— what the Primum Motile 
was in the ancient systems of astronomy — an 
all-encircling and all-upholding concave, within 
which every wrong and every Crime lias its 
natural home— when 1 affirm this, 1 affirm it 
of the system or institution of slavery. And 

to this I wish to add — what all history provi 

that good men may he implicated in a bad 
system— as in the English hierarchy, which 1 
regard as a vicious system of church govern- 
ment; and yet how many super-cminently 
great, and good, and pious men it has pro- 
duced; or. as in the Catholic religion, which I 
believe to he an untrue form of Christianity, 
and yet in no religion have there been brighter 
examples of purity and beneficence. In bat- 
tling to overcome the moral wrongs and errors 
into which a man has been born, the moral 
sentiments, like the intellect, grow heroic as 
they become victorious, and in their noble 
strivings they reach a sublimity of virtue pro- 
portioned to the depths of vice from which 
thej' sprang. But this does not prevent bad 
systems from producing their natural fruits on 
the mass of men. 

And now, having shown what a mighty 
wrong slavery is, in and of itself; having shown 
what collateral debasement, cruelty, and prac- 
tical atheism, it generates and diffuses, let me 
ask, if the political Free Soil party do not go 
to the uttermost verge that patriot, moralist, or 
Christian can go, when it consents to let sla- 
very remain where it is ? Thefre is an en- 
deavor to make up a false issue for the coun- 
try, and for the tribunal of history, on this sub- 
ject. Free-Soilers are charged with interfering 
with slavery within the jurisdiction of the 
States where it is. This allegation is wholly 
unfounded. Our whole effort has been sim- 
ply to keep it within the jurisdiction of the 
States where it is. We would not have it pro- 
fane free territory. We would not allow it to 
double its present domain ; we would, not see 
it blast with nameless and innumerable woes, 
two-thirds of our territorial area on the Pacific 
coast, as it already has two-thirds on the At- 
lantic. This is all we have done. And, to the 
argument that, with only about three slaves 
to a square mile over all your territory, you, 
gentlemen of the slave States, must have more 
space, because you are becoming suffocated by 
bo close crowding, we simply reply, that we 
cannot admit that argument, because it devotes 
the whole world to inevitable slavery. For, if 
you already need a greater expanse of territory 
for comfortable room, that, too, will soon be 
crowded with three slaves to a square mile, 
and the argume. r or further conquest and ex- 
pansion will come back upon us. Yielding 
again, the argument will speedily recur again. 



It will be a never-ending, still-beginning, pre- 
text for extension, until the whole world shall 
Become a reel realm of slavery — even tin 
State, being engulfed with the rest, so that the 
dove of freedom will have no spot on the sur- 
face of the globe where she ran set her foot. 

And now, notwithstanding the infinite evil 
and wrong of slavery, intrinsic in it. and in- 
separable from it: notwithstanding the virus 
with which it poisons all our free institutions — 
its exclusion of independent communities from 
the brotherhood of the I Dion; it, hardening 
the nation's heart against all people struggling 
for liberty; its atheist-making; its attempt to 
transfer the whole false English code of high 
treason into our law; and all its debasement 
of the republican sentiment, aid the moral 
sentiment of this country — notwithstanding all 
this, the Baltimore Conventions decree thai the 
subject of slavery shall he agitated among us 
no more forever. 

_ Look at the comprehensiveness of this inter- 
dict. It embraces all subjects. It forbids the 
political economist from discussing the relative 
productiveness of free and slave labor. It for- 
bids the educationist from demonstrating that 
a slaveholding people must always, from the 
necessity of the case, be an ignorant people — a 
people divided not only into castes of wealth, 
but into castes of intelligence. It forbids ge- 
nius from presenting Truth in the glowing 
similitudes of Fiction ; and that divine-hearted 
woman, the authoress of u Uncle Tom's Cabin,'-' 
is under the Baltimore ban. It forbids the 
poet, whose lips from olden days have been 
touched as with live coals from off the heaven- 
ly altar — from ever again kindling the hearts 
of mankind with a divine enthusiasm for lib- 
erty. It strikes out all the leading chapters 
from the book of the moralist. It puts its seal 
upon the lips of the minister of Christ, when 
he would declare the whole counsel of God, 
and forbids him ever again to preach from the 
text, '• Whatsoever ye would that men should 
do unto you, do ye even so unto them.' ; All — 
worldly prosperity, education, genius, morality, 
religion, truth — are struck out by these Balti- 
more Conventions in their maniacal partisan- 
ship. 

The noblest men whom God has ever sent 
into the world — patriots, reformers, philanthro- 
pists, apostles, and Jesus Christ himself — are on 
the side of freedom. Tyrants, usurpers, trai- 
tors, mcn-stealers, the wholesale murderers and 
robbers of nations, are on the side of slavery. 
The Baltimore Conventions enlist under the 
1. aimers of the latter. They affiliate with the 
House of Hapsburg, and with Nicholas; with 
the King of Naples, and with the " Prince 
President" of France. One might almost 
suppose they had plagiarized their resolves 
from the Paris Moniteur, where that ape who 
mimics the imperial grandeur he cannot com- 
prehend, records his tyrannical decrees against 
freedom of speech. Louis Napoleon decreed 



14 



free discussion out of existence in France. Six 
hundred men at Baltimore decreed the same 
thing for this country. The ape succeeded; 
they fail. 

And how are thesa resolves to be construed, 
pi'ovided new questions respecting slavery arise, 
or questions already started are precipitated 
upon us ? Should an attempt to annex Cuba, 
in order still further to aggrandize the Slave 
Power, be made — and if General Pierce should 
be elected such attempt doubtless will be 
made — or should a new slave State, with a 
slave Constitution, from California, apply for 
admission — or should Mexico be again dismem- 
bered to form new slave territory and new slave 
States — in the occurrence of these events, or 
of either of them, how are these Baltimore res- 
olutions to be then construed ? We know per- 
fectly well what claim will be set up. It will 
be said that the new events come within the 
terms of the prohibition — the casus foederis — 
and bind the nation to silence. It will be 
claimed that the resolutions cover not only all 
subjects, but all time ; and enslave our chil- 
dren as well as ourselves. 

I have exposed the character and extent of 
those resolutions. Let me now expose their 
motive. I charge upon those Conventions the 
base motive of attempting to silence discussion 
by force — as in this House and in the Senate, 
the same spirit once rejected petitions, and 
would now silence debate — because they are 
conscious they cannot meet it by argument. 
The Fugitive Slave Law, for instance, is as- 
sailed by the jurist, because it is unconstitu- 
tional ; by the patriot, because it disgraces the 
country in the eyes of the civilized world ; by 
the religious man, because it is unchristian ; 
and by every one who has the sentiment of 
humanity in his bosom, for its unheard-of cru- 
elty. The upholders of that law can answer 
no one of these arraignments. Their only re- 
source, therefore, is the dastardly denial of 
discussion and free speech — like Louis Napo- 
leon, who having no possibility of reply to the 
accusations of treachery, perjury, and usurpa- 
tion, forbids the accusations to be made. 
Among all our constitutional judges, and among 
all those mock judges called Commissioners, 
there is not one who has met the arguments 
against the constitutionality of this law. They 
intrench themselves behind a feeble rampart 
of precedents as their only defence. Judge Nog- 
gins decides it to be constitutional,because Judge 
Scroggins has decided it to be so. And when 
we look back to Judge Scroggins for light, we 
find he decided it to be constitutional, because 
Judge Spriggins had held it to be so. Chief 
Justice Shaw, of Massachusetts, whom I re- 
gard as one of the ablest judges who ever ad- 
ministered the common law, anywhere, virtu- 
ally admitted, in the Sims case, that if the ques- 
tion of the constitutionality of this law were a 
new one, the affirmative could not be sustained. 
I repeat, then, it is a dastardly order to keep 



silence, because they cannot meet discussion. 
Necessity is their only defence, 
and with necessity, 



The tj'rant's plea, excuse their devilish deed." 
Let me state, in a few simple propositions, 
the unconstitutionality of the Fugitive Slave 
Law, which has been so much elaborated else- 
where : 

Excepting the Army and Navy, the Consti- 
tution of the United States declares that " no 
person shall * * be deprived of life, lib- 
erty, or property, without due process of law." 
It also declares that, " in suits at common law, 
where the value in controversy shall exceed 
twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall 
be preserved." 

Now, every case of claim for an alleged 
slave necessarily involves both the question of 
liberty and the question of property. 

By the Constitution of every free State in 
this Union, every person within it is presumed 
to be a free man ; or, in other words, there is 
never any prima facie presumption that any 
man within it is a slave. Every man is pre- 
sumptively free until proved to be otherwise. 
If the civil condition or status of slavery is to 
be fastened upon any one, it must be done by 
the decision of a tribunal having jurisdiction 
over liberty and property — that is, by court 
and jury. The prima facie evidence that a man 
is free, entitles him to the tribunal and the trial 
of a free man. But under this Fugitive Slave 
Law, a man's prima facie right to the tribunal 
and the trial of a free man is taken away, not 
by a court and jury, but by a complaint and 
warrant. A claimant demands a human being 
presumptively free as his slave, and that mere 
demand is made to cancel the presumption of 
freedom and self-ownership, to take him away 
from a freeman's tribunal of court and jury, 
and to carry him for trial before a slave tribu- 
nal — that is, a Commissioner. Is it replied, 
that the decision of the Commissioner that he 
is a slave, and not a free man, proves that he 
had no right to the tribunal and the trial of a 
free man — I retort, that before an unbought, 
unbribed, freeman's tribunal, there might have 
been a contrary decision ; but you prejudged 
him to be a slave, by carrying him before a 
slave tribunal, and you robbed him of the first 
right of a freeman, by depriving him of a free- 
man's tribunal and trial. For him, and for 
his case, you abolished the trial by jury. And 
if, by virtue of such complaint and warrant, you 
can deprive any person, in any free State, of 
a trial by jury, you can by the same rule de- 
prive all the men in all the free States of this 
trial — that is, you can abolish that trial for 
all this class of cases; and then, by equivalent 
legislation, you can abolish it in all cases what- 
ever. Where, then, is that right to a trial by 
jury which the Constitution declares "shall 
be preserved?" 

The law, then, is palpably unconstitutional ; 
because it takes from a man presumptively 



15 



free the right to be tried as a freeman : and 
it is because the Baltimore Conventions cannot 
answer this argument, that they forbid its pro- 
mulgation. . 

And besides this, the proofs which the law 
provides for and declares conclusive are abhor- 
rent to reason, to common tense, and to the 
common law. ltjirovides that evidence taken 
in a Southern State, at any time or place 
which a claimant may select, without any no- 
tice, or any possibility of knowledge on the 
part of the person to be robbed and enslaved 
by it, may be clandestinely carried or sent to 
any place where it is to be used, and there 
sprung upon its victim, as a wild beast springs 
from its jungle upon the passer-by; and it 
provides that this evidence, thus surreptitiously 
taken and used, shall be conclusive proof of 
the tacts of slavery and of escape from slavery. 
It does not submit the sufficiency of the evi- 
dence to the judgment of the tribunal; but it 
arbitrarily makes it conclusive, whether suffi- 
cient or not. It abolishes the common law dis- 
tinction between competency and credibility. 
Indeed, it abolishes the elementary idea of a 
court of justice itself, considered as a tribunal 
whose functions are, first and chiefest, to hear 
both sides, and then to discern between truth 
and falsehood. The heathen emblem of jus- 
tice was that of a goddess, holding balances in 
her hand, and weighing with holy exactness 
all conflicting probabilities and testimonies. The 
true emblem of this law would be that of some 
Glossin lawyer clutching at ten dollars as a bribe, 
and trampling the sacred balances under foot. 

What would the Southern gentlemen who 
hear me say, if, while attending to your duties 
in this Hall, a miscreant in any Northern city 
or State, without knowledge or possibility of 
knowledge on your part, should now be suborn- 
ing witnesses to obtain evidence that your 
house, your plantation, or cotton crop, was his, 
->nd by and by should make his appearance on 
ir premises, demanding instant possession, 
i, in case of refusal or demur, should drag 
you'before some ten-dollar magistrate, read his 
conclusive proof, while you are forced to be 
dumb, and then thrust you out of estate, house, 
and home ? And yet this Fugitive Slave Law 
is as much more atrocious than that would be, 
as liberty is more precious than pelf. 

The cruel fruits of this law have been such 
as might be expected to grow on so wicked a 
stock. The first man sent into slavery under 
it, Adam Gibson, was a free man. When the 
claimant's agent brought Gibson to him, he 
refused to receive him ; for he knew, and he 
knew that all his household and neighbors 
would know, that Gibson had never been his 
slave. And so, after this free man had been 
seized as a slave, and sentenced as a slave and 
dragged forcibly away from home to Mary- 
land as a slave, by the authority and at the 
expense of the United States, be was set adrift 
and left to find hi» way back as he could. 



Of the first eight persons doomed to slavery 
und(T this law, four were free men. 

When this dreadful law was first broached, 
it waa said that we might rely upon the intel- 
ligence and the integrity of the Southern courts 
to send into the land of freedom no certificates 
that would doom men to bondage, unless found- 
ed upon competent and undoubted testimony. 
But in the case of Daniel, who was tried be- 
fore Mr. Commissioner Smith, at Buffalo, the 
slave claimant never carried a single witness 
before the court that made the record of sla- 
very and of escape. The Southern court made 
the record on affidavits only, and then gavo the 
claimant a certified copy of it, without ever 
seeing or hearing a witness in the case. These 
affidavits were given by nobody knows whom, 
and sworn to by nobody knows whom— per- 
haps not sworn to at all, but forged for the occa- 
sion ; yet on sight of them the commissioner 
pronounced Daniel to be a slave. It afterwards 
turned out, on a hearing before Judge Conk- 
ling, of the United States court, that there 
never had been one particle or scintilla of evi- 
dence before the commissioner, on which his 
ten-dollar certificate of slavery was founded. 

In another case, in Philadelphia. Commis- 
sioner lngraham decided some point directly 
against law and authority ; and when a decis- 
io°n of a judge of the United States court was 
produced against him, he coolly said he differ- 1 
ed from the judge, made out the certificate, 
pocketed the ten dollars, and sent a human be- 
ing to bondage. There could be no appeal 
from this iniquity, for the law allows none. 

In another case, before Mr. Commissioner 
Hallett, of Boston, where white persons were 
examined, on a charge of rescuing an alleged 
slave, he admitted this foreign evidence of a 
State court, taken in secret, against the native- 
born citizens of a free State. 

And yet, with all these abominations on the 
face of the law, and after this long train of 
outrages in its administration, the Baltimore 
Whig resolutions, which, perhaps, are the less 
iniquitous of the two, declare that the law shal 
not be modified, 'unless "time and experience 
shall demonstrate some abuse of its powers. 
How low down must these men live, that they 
do not call what has already happened an 

abuse ! ,. . . » 

A story is current respecting the origin ot 
this law, for whose authenticity I cannot per- 
sonally vouch ; but it certainly carries verisi- 
militude on its face. The bill is said to have 
been concocted by a Southern disumonist. anx- 
ious for some pretext to break up the Repub- 
lie; and who therefore prepared a bill sc .un- 
constitutional, so abominable and fiendish that 
as he believed, even the recklessness ot North- 
ern servility must spurn it. He would then 
make its rejection his war-cry for disunion 
But, alas! he had not fathomed the baseness ol 
Northern politicians. What a Southern " fare, 
eater » thought too unrighteous for any human 



16 



being to touch, the Northern aspirants for the 
Presidency adopted " with alacrity," and roll- 
ed as a sweet morsel under their tongue. Now, 
both Whig and Democratic Conventions reaf- 
firm the law, and attribute to it a sacredness 
and a permanency unknown to the Constitu- 
tion itself. 

Sir, when . I survey, one after another, the 
horrid features of this law — its palpable viola- 
tion both of the letter and the spirit of the Con- 
stitution ; its contempt and defiance of that 
great organic law, the Declaration of Independ- 
ence, and of the whole spirit and acts and lives 
of our re volution ary fathers; its repugnance to 
all the noblest maxims and principles of the 
British Constitution, consecrated and hallowed 
as these have been from age to age by patriots' 
struggles and by martyrs' blood; its fabrica- 
tion of such a code of evidence as was never 
before placed on the statute-book of any civil- 
ized nation; its provisions for deciding conclu- 
sively the question of a man's liberty, in what 
is to him a foreign State, and before what is to 
him a foreign tribunal, without the possibility 
of his appearing there to confront witnesses, or, 
even of knowing what the conspirators against 
him are doing ; its peremptory orders to seize 
a man, and try the unspeakably precious ques- 
tion of his freedom and self-ownership, " in a 
summary manner," when even robbers, pirates, 
and murderers, must have notice of their accu- 
sation,-adequate time to prepare for defence 
and counsel for assistance ; its bribing magis- 
trates to decide against liberty, and in favor of 
slavery, and its] creation of a set of officers, 
some of whom have so decided as to prove them- 
selves capable of accepting a bribe; its instant 
execution of the|dreadful sentence, without ap- 
peal or writ of error ; its repudiation of the 
statute of limitations, (the policy of which is 
recognised by all civilized nations, not only in 
cases of debt, but in regard to the title to real 
estate, and even in regard to crimes,) so that a 
master who has abandoned his slave for forty 
years can come and pluck him from wife and 
children, from home, property, and friends — 
and when, further, I see the practical workings 
of this law — free Northern citizens carried into 
bondage ; Southern professors in the art of kid- 
napping, chasing the shrieking fugitive from 
all his hiding-places and his altars; monster 
fathers pursuing the children of their own loins, 
as lately happened in New York, to sell them 
into slavery ; the virtuous woman hunted by 
the lecher, from whose whips and scourgings 
she had fled, to avoid his guilty embrace ; thou- 
sands of laborious and peaceable citizens 
amongst us. surrounded by self-earned comfort 
and competence, fleeing from all the endear- 
ing relations of kindred and neighborhood, out 
of a republic into a monarchy, to regain the 
lost birth-right of freedom — thus re-enacting 
the scenes of the Huguenot flight under Charles 
IX ; and, as the crowning cruelty of the whole, 
an entire race of free people, of" innocent peo- 



ple, of people whose ancestors fought and fell 
in the battles of the Revolution, and who have 
as much right, not merely to security and pro- 
tection, but to the feeling of security and pro- 
tection, under our Government, as you or I — 
when I see these people, filled with consterna- 
tion and dismay for themselves and for their, 
children, trembling when they look around 
them upon the earth, lest some tiger, in human 
shape, should spring from his ambush and seize 
them, and plunge them into slavery's hell, and 
trembling when they look upward into the sky, 
because God seems to have forsaken them; sir, 
when I contemplate all these things,, I am com- 
pelled, though against the common faith, to ac- 
knowledge evidence of supernatural inspiration 
in the hearts of men. But it is infernal and 
diabolical inspiration, whose evidences I recog- 
nise.'^ Sir, this Fugitive Slave Law was not 
made by man alone : for unaided total deprav- 
ity is not equal to all its atrocities. Place the 
law and the Baltimore edicts side by side, the 
command and the prohibition together. "You 
shall chase the fugitive, but you shall not 
speak." As in the days of the early Christians, 
or like the Pilgrim Fathers, in the times of the 
non-conformists, we may hold our meetings 
only in dens or caves, or in the most secret re- 
cesses of our dwellings, with doors locked and 
guarded. Once the bloodhounds were muzzled ; 
now the bloodhounds are let loose, and freemen 
are muzzled. 

Sir, when any humane and intelligent man 
reflects upon the attributes of this law, and 
then turns to the fiat of the Baltimore Conven- 
tions, that it shall not be agitated or discussed, 
he cannot but tremble with an agony of indig- 
nation and contempt. These resolves are so 
subversive, not only of all divine but of all hu- 
man government; the.y are so audacious and 
yet so impotent ; they assume so imperial an 
air, while yet they are more imbecile than an 
idiot's gibberish, that the great poet of our lan- 
guage, whose mind supplies redundant images 
for all things vile and mean, has but one pas- 
sage that befits their vileness. To borrow his 
words, these Baltimore resolutions are a 

" birth-strangled babe, 

Ditch-deliver'd by a drab." 

Justice and gratitude, however, demand that I 
should say that there were sixty-seven mem- 
bers of the Whig Convention who stood out 
bravely and to the last against this attempted 
abolition of the freedom of speech. In the Dem- 
ocratic Convention there seems to have been 
scarcely a whisper of dissent. 

Sir, I cannot but acknowledge that the events 
I have recited have an ominous look for the 
cause of freedom. It seems as though the black 
cloud which has settled down over Europe was 
extending its gloomy folds across this country, 
to envelop, in darkness and despair, the last 
hopes of liberty upon earth. But I have infi- 
nite faith in God and in truth. I believe that 
cloud to be surcharged with lightnings which 



will jet blast tl.e oppressor, And after the 
lightnings and the storm have passed, then 
shall come the day of universal freedom and 

joy. 

' "False as those Baltimore Conventions were 
to the Constitution of the United States, to the 
Declaration of Independence, tci humanity, and 
to God. jet when we come to scan their proceed- 
ings more closely, we find that they were 
amenable to a power they refused to acknowl- 
edge. It was there as in the ancient mythol- 
ogy: the gods decreed, but there was an inex- 
orable fate standing behind the gods, and con- 
trolling their decrees. That irresistible fate, 
which bound the Conventions as with a spell, 
and hemmed in their desires and aptitudes for 
wrong, which was a will within their will, was 
the g'enius of Northern Anti-Slavery. There 
were at least half a do/.en candidates, whom 
the Democratic Convention vastly preferred to 
the one they finally took up with; and there 
was at least one, whom the Whig Convention, 
under the Southern pressure brought to bear 
upon them, would have consented to take, but 
for the uplifted arm of the North, which men- 
aced inexorable defeat for any such selection, 
and would have terribly executed its menace. 
As in the vision of the Scottish seer, ' : coming 
events cast their shadows before," so here the 
coming thunders of the people's rebuke sent 
their echoes forward, and forbade both Con- 
ventions from inscribing the more apostate 
names upon their banners. It was the Free 
Soil party of the North that held those thun- 
ders in its hands; and if it did not determine 
whom the Conventions should nominate, it did 
determine whom they should not. 

Why did not the Democratic party nomi- 
nate General Cass? For forty years he had 
stood conspicuously before the country: had 
served in early life, in a military capacity, on 
the Northern 'frontier : been afterwards Gov- 
ernor of a Territory now swarming with three 
millions of men ; Ambassador abroad and Cab- 
inet Minister and Senator at home. Besides, he 
was a man of unblamable private life — one 
who. whatever sinister rewards he may have 
expected, never exposed himself to the inputa- 
tion of bartering his integrity for -dotations;" 
reputed, and I believe justly reputed, to be a 
temperance man — which fact, by itself, had he 
been a candidate against a man of known in- 
temperate habits, would have given him fifty 
thousand votes in New England alone — a fact 
which future Presidential aspirants will do 
well to heed. Why was not General Cass 
nominated? His Ndcbolson letter was the 
flaming barrier, which neither the perverse 
Baahuu of Democracy, nor its beast, was able 
to pa-s by ! By that letter, as the returns of 
1848 show, General Cass struck off a hundred 
thousand votes from his ticket in the State of 
New York alone. General Cass died of a mod- 
ern disease, called •< letter-writing," which has 



proved singularly fatal to Presidential candi- 
dates. The Nicholson letter was the malignant 
distemper that bloated and killed him. 

Why was not Mr. Buchanan nominated — 
the favorite of that great State which, as she 
inclines one way or the other, seems to rock 
and sway the Union, and determine the result 
in every Presidential election? He was a man 
of great powers — one whom nature had laid 
out on a grand scale. When the history of 
this country is written, Mr. Buchanan's name 
cannot be put in a parenthesis. He made 
General Jackson, rather than General Jackson 
him. His talruis, with those of Gov. Marcy, 
uf New York, were the salt that saved Mr. 
Polk"s Administration from putridity. He was 
a daring man. In 18-18, in an official commu- 
nication to the French Provisional Govern- 
ment, he boldly obtruded his counsels upon 
them for the formation of their Constitution, as 
though the new Republic were his ward. La- 
martiue politely made a French bow in return; 
but saying, as he gave it. he would not toler- 
ate advice from any other people God ever 
created. 

Why was not Mr. Buchanan nominated? 
Ah ! be bad been even bolder in bis domestic 
diplomacy than in his foreign. His offer to 
run the Missouri Compromise line through to 
the Pacific ocean, and to sacrifice all south of 
that line on the altar of the Moloch of slavery, 
was a grand act of apostacy to Northern sen- 
timent and to freedom, which brought the films 
of death over his eyes. His coup d'etat was a 
coup dc grace. He will be less successful in 
making such Northern platforms than in 
making French Constitutions. In all the States 
north of Pennsylvania, during the forty-nine 
ballotings, he rarely received more than half 
a dozen votes ; and I think his average in those 
States did not come up to that insignificant, or 
rather that significant number. 

And what was the fate of the Senator from 
Illinois, whom some sagacious and overreach- 
ing Whig called the Young Giant— a nick- 
name which his own friends were silly enough 
to adopt? I say silly, for everybody knows that 
the common notion which the common people 
have of a "young giant'-' is that of unnatural 
and precocious animal development. _ The very 
name conjures up images of rowdyish passion 
and appetite, of nocturnal revels, of a sort of 
wild, obscene force, unchastened by the lessons 
of experience, and untempered by Nestonan 
wisdom. What was his reward for his implied 
or understood offer of the annexation of Cuba? 
From the four States of Massachusetts, New 
York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, he never at any 
one time received more than sixteen votes, and 
in four-fifths of the ballotings lie received but 
five or six. In winning the South, he forgot 
the North. 



" Vaulting ambition that ocrlcaps itself 
And {alls on t'other sido. : ' 



18 



Or, as a graver poet has expressed it, these 
worshippers at the Southern shrine, while they 
renounced Northern constituencies, were 
" like idiots gazing in a brook, 
"Who leap at stars and fasten in the mud." 
I cannot stop to enumerate the victims in 
detail. The slain Hectors may have a monu- 
ment and be remembered; but it is the felicity 
of the vulgar herd, in an ungodly contest, that 
they rot in a forgotten grave. 

Long before the Baltimore Convention met, 
we had supposed that the Northern Democrat- 
ic aspirants for the Presidency had done their 



retributions of sin shall pursue the sinner. If 
the preacher does this when he has but a single 
victim for a text, what an accumulation of 
energy and emphasis is given to his admoni- 
tions when there are fifteen victims before 
him ! 

^ Now, there are two or three general observa- 
tions on this impressive spectacle, which I wish 
to make. In the first place, all the leading 
candidates of both Conventions were Northern 
men. Would not the historian have signalized 
the event as something most extraordinary, if 
fifteen Southern champions of slavery, born and 



worst; that they had drank the last dregs of bred in its midst, whose very growth, bodily 



the cup of humiliation. But Southern genius 
seems exhaustless in resources for Northern de- 
basement. Some unknown political upstart in 
Richmond, Virginia, obtruded himself into 
notice by shouting out the two words, " Presi- 
dency, " "Pro-Slavery/"' to all the candidates, 
and instantly thirteen of them were at his feet. 
He put to them some " more last questions" in 
the catechism of infamy — : ' whether, if they 
could be elected, they would veto any bill re- 
pealing the Fugitive Slave Law," and so forth. 
All answered as his questions indicated they 
must. Forgetful of the nature of the oath they 
longed to take, forgetful that it is a violation 
of the whole spirit of our Government for the 
Executive to interfere with Congress, by tell- 
ing them beforehand what acts of theirs he 
will not approve, they all hastened to give the 
desired response. He did not send them a 
pro-slavery creed, with a blank left for their 
signatures, but he compelled them to write out 
their own shame with their own hands. He 
did not send the collar and chains all ready 
for them to put on : but he said, forge them 
and rivet them on yourselves; and, submissive, 
they forged them and riveted them on, and ex- 
pressed gratitude for the favor. 

And now, where are those thirteen Demo- 
cratic candidates? And where, too, are those 
two Whig candidates who, within the last two 
years, have done every conceivable thing, and 
a^ thousand things before inconceivable, to pro- 
pitiate the slave power ? Gone, sir ; all gone 
with those who perish at Tyburn ! They re- 
belled against humanity and against God, and 
verily they have their reward. They mounted 
a platform, where they hoped to be crowned, 
amid the huzzas of the people; but an aveng- 
ing Nemesis stood there, and in the twinkling 
of an eye changed it into the " drop platform" 
of the executioner Sir, when a single male- 
factor receives at the hands of justice his well- 
merited doom, the moralist seizes the example 
to give a warning to others who may be tempt- 
ed, in like cases, to offend. He points to the 
ignominious body of his victim, and, as the 
herald of God, he proclaims the eternal law, 
that crime never can compensate the criminal. 
He declares that, until finite man can over- 
power or circumvent the infinite Creator, the 



and mental, had been only the accretion of 
pro-slavery particles and ideas, and who were 
committed to the institution by a life- long se- 
ries of acts, had suddenly gone over to North- 
ern Free-Soilers, and offered to stand upon 
their platform to obtain their votes? Would 
it have at all diminished the marvel, if these 
fifteen Southern applicants for Northern sup- 
port, with all the followers whom lust of power 
or of money could enlist, had gone through all 
the South, vociferating that, unless they should 
adopt the Free Soil platform, the Union would 
be dissolved? I think such a chapter in his- 
tory would never cease to create amazement 
and wonder. Is it not infinitely more wonder- 
ful, in this age of the world, that Northern 
men should do for slavery what we could never 
expect, at one time, so many Southern men to 
do even for freedom ? 

My second remark pertains to the number 
of the candidates. Never were there even half 
so many on the Presidential race-course before. 
Now, why were they so numerous, as well as 
all from the North ? The answer is obvious. 
The South had said again and again, and most 
explicitly, to the North, "Give us your most 
pro-slavery man, and we will adopt him." It 
is easy to see that when moral or even intel- 
lectual qualifications are the test in choosing a 
President, the candidates must be few; but if 
devotion to slavery is the sole test, then there 
may not only be fifteen, but five hundred or 
five thousand. In this way the competitors be- 
come so numerous ,that the chances of success 
are worth nothing. Nobody will pay much for 
a lottery ticket, when the blanks are to the 
prizes as a hundred to one. It was a poor 
speculation, therefore, for the Presidential as- 
pirants to put the price of the office so low that 
anybody, however obscure before, could become 
a rival. Cass. Buchanan, Marcy, Douglas, 
Dallas, Dickinson, and so forth, should have 
thought of this before they entered the lists, 
and put themselves on an equality with a man 
whom not one in five thousand out of New 
Hampshire could remember ever to have heard 
of before, and yet who plucked the prize out 
of their hands. 

Another remark is, that the Southern vote,, 
in both Conventions, could have been concen- 



19 

(rated at any time upon cither one of the 
Northern candidates, with one reniarkahle ex- 
ception — which I will mention hy and hy — 
provided only that the Northern men could 
have united upon him. At any moment the 
South would have accepted General Cass, or 
Mr. Buchanan, or Governor Marcy. In the 
Whig Convention, the South was most anxious 
to take Mr. Fillmore ; but it was impossible to 
bring the North to their support. Each of 
them, by the eagerness of his pro-slavery 
course, had signed his own death-warrant in 
States enough to defeat him. And as to Mr. 
Fillmore, on whom the South wa^ more unani- 
mous than on any one of all the other candi- 
dates, his bloody right hand had signed the 
Fugitive Slave Law; and therefore it was as 
certain as anything future can be, that he 
could not obtain a single electoral vote north 
of Mason and Dixon's line. The infinite mercy 
of God may wash that blot from his name in 
another world, hut it can never he forgotten in 
this. And thus they all came under that great 
moral law which forever cries '-Woe! woe!" 
to the offender. Fascinated by the brilliancy 
of the prize, they forgot the eternal law of rec- 
titude and humanity, by which alone it can be 
honorably won and worn. 

[A Voice. What do you say of General 
Pierce ?] 

Mr. MANN. Some one inquires what I say 
of General Pierce. I say of General Pierce, 
that if he had been conspicuous in the pro-sla- 
very contest for the last two years; if he had 
been known as the ardent lover of the Fugitive 
Slave Law, and had answered the Richmond 
Scott letter about a veto of it, he never would 
have received the Baltimore nomination. Some 
other man would have been exhumed for the 
occasion. Not knowledge of him. but igno- 
rance of him, secured his nomination. 
[A Voice. How of General Scott ?] 
Mr. MANN. Had General Scott devoted 
himself to the cause of slavery for the last two 
years, as his competitors had done, he would 
not have been nominated. His short-comings 
in that iniquity, as everybody knows, is the 
reason, and I might almost say the sole reason, 
■why the South and the pro-slavery part of the 
North oppose him. But for this, the South 
would prefer him before either of his rivals. 

In regard to Mr. Webster, there are three 
points which I propose to elucidate — his posi- 
tion of special and marked hostility to slavery 
in 1848, what he did for the cause of slavery 
in 1850, and how the South requited him in 
1852. His case is peculiarly impressive. In- 
structive warnings as all the others are. yet 
'• the Secretary stands alone." I am about to 
speak of his downfall in no spirit of pergonal 
exultation, though he has done me the greatest 
wrong. Because, when sitting on the top of 
his political Olympus, he hurled his shafts at 
mcf, I scorn to retaliate when he lies deserted 



and despairing at its base. The man does not 
live, (unless now it be himself.) who felt a more 
poignant grief at his ruin than was felt in this 
heart of mine. But it was not on the 21st of 
June last, and at Baltimore, that he fell; but 
on the 7th of March, 1850. in the Senate of 
the United States. It was then that he sunk 
his beaming forehead in the dust, never again, 
I fear, to be lifted up. It was then that he 
tore from his brow the glorious diadem of 
Fame, and cast its clustered stars away — a di- 
adem richer than ever blazed upon the brow 
of royalty, for its gems were not gathered from 
rock or mine, but from the more precious treas- 
ures of wisdom and eloquence. Then thousands 
of hearts were wrung with anguish, as, cold, 
relentless, and blaspheming, those apostate 
doctrines fell from his lips. I say no bosom. 
Bave now perhaps his own. was i rermore deep- 
ly saddened at the spectacle of that moral ruin 
than mine. As I think of him now, ever re- 
curring and dirge-like do the elegiac strains, 
written for the occasion by the great Poet of 
Humanity, wake their mournful echoes in my 
breast : 

" So fallen ! so lost! the light withdrawn 

Which once he wore ! 
The priory from his gray hairs gone 

Forevermorc ! 

Revile him not — the Tempter hath 

A snare for all ; 
And pitving tears, not scorn and wrath, 

Befit his fall ! 

Oh! dumb be passion's stormy rage, 

When he who might 
Have lighted up and led his age, 

Falls back in night. 

Scorn! would the angels laugh to mark 

A bright soul driven, 
Fiend-goaded, down the endless dark, 

From hope and Heaven ! 

Let not the land, once proud of him, 

Insult him now, 
Nor brand with deeper shame his dim, 

Dishonored brow. 

But let its humblest sons, instead, 

From sea to lake, 
A long lament, as for the dead, 

In sadness make. 

Of all wo loved and honored, naught 

Save power remains — 
A fallen angel's prido of thought, 

Still strong in chains. 

All else is gone : from those great eyes 

The soul has Bed ; 
When faith is lost, when honor dies, 

The man is dead ! 

Then pay the reverence of old days 
To his dead fame : 

Walk backward, with avorted gazo, 

And hide his shame' " 

Still. I should leave this part of my subject 
maimed and incomplete, should I forbear to 
draw the moral which the fate of this eminent 
man so impressively teaches. In the history of 
the world, it is inexpressibly sad that offences 



20 



should come. It would he still more sad if we 
could not use them to warn others from offend- 
ing. Besides, the drama, in one of whose scenes 
we were brought together upon the stage and 
euacted a part, has now heen played out. and 
1 am now able to establish by history all the 
positions I then maintained by argument. 

The grandeur of Mr. Webster's intellect — 
the first point always made in his defence — I 
readily admit. On this point I give his friends 
carte blanche of concession and agreement — the 
whole argument their own way. 

Bat, on thenext point, I claim to have the 
whole concession and argument my own way: 
that though his intellect were fitted to fill a 
'•Dome of Thought," vast as one of those Egyp- 
tian statues that have been lately found on the 
banks of the Nile, from whose craniums the na- 
tives have long been in the habit of cutting 
millstones without sensibly diminishing their 
bulk, yet if he could exchange it all to blot out 
the history of the 7'h of March speech, he 
would make a divine speculation. 

For proof of this, I might cite volumes. I 
might refer to his Pilgrim Address at Plym- 
outh, and his reply to Col. Hayne, and select 
something from almost every page of those vol- 
umes of eloquence— beautiful as painting, and 
grand as statuary— whose appeals fell upon 
men's hearts like an afflatus of the spirit of 
God. With all this, I might theu contrast 
what he has written and spoken since the day 
of his downfall, pictorial as it is, with emblems 
of whips and chains, of auction-blocks, and 
shrieking fugitives, fleeing from the bloody 
lash and the lecher's arms, and finding no pro- 
tection in the sanctuary of Faneuil Hall, or un- 
der the shadow of Banker Hill, or by the sa- 
cred monuments of Lexington and Concord. 

But I will confine myself to a single item of 
proof, irrefragable and conclusive: 

The Buffalo Contention of 1848 proclaimed 
its determination -to maintain the rights of 
free labor against the aggressions of the slave 
power, and to secure free soil for a free people." 
It declared its "'independence of the slave 
power, and its fixed determination to rescue the 
Federal Government from its control." 

It declared that the Proviso of Jefferson, to 
prohibit slavery in all the Territories, and the 
Ordinance of 1787, excluding slavery from the 
Northwestern Territory, ■'• clearly show that it 
was the settled policy of the nation, not to ex- 
tend, nationalize, or encourage, but to limit, lo- 
calize, and discourage slavery; and to this poli- 
cy, which should never have been departed 
from, the Government ought to return." 

It declared '-that it is the duty of the, Fed- 
eral Government to relieve itself from all re- 
sponsibility for the existence or continuance of 
slavery wherever that Government possesses 
constitutional authority to legislate on that 
subject, and is thus responsible for its exist- 
ence." 



^declared " that the only safe means of pre- 
venting the extension of slavery into territory 
now free, is to prohibit its existence in all such 
territory by an act of Congress." 

It declared " that we accept the issue which 
the slave power has forced upon us, and to 
their demand for more slave territories, our 
calm but final answer is. no more slave States — 
no more slave territory." 

And what did Mr. Webster say of this plat- 
form, within one month after it had been adopt- 
ed? This is his language: 

" I have said, gentlemen, that in this Buffalo plat- 
form, this collect of tho new school, there is nothing 
new. There is nothing in it that all the Whigs of 
the Northern and Middle States may not adopt. 
Gentlemen, it is well known that there is nothing in 
this Buffalo platform which, in general, does not 
meet the approbation of all the Whigs of the Middle 
and Northern States. Suppose, now, that all of U3 
who nre Whigs should go and join the Free Soil par- 
ty, what would he the result? Why, so far nothing 
would happen, but that the Whig party would have 
changed its name. That would be all. Instead of 
being tho Whig party, it would bo the Free Soil par- 
ty. We should be all there, exactly upon the same 
principles upon which we have always stood." 

Now, contrast this full, explicit, comprehen- 
sive, and apparently ingenuous subscription 
and adhesion to all the doctrines and articles 
of the Buffalo platform, in 1848, with the 7th 
of March speech in 1850. aud with all that has 
since followed it from the same source. 

Surely, if General Jackson, in 1836, in order 
to obtain a third election, had courted and de- 
fended the United States Bank, written and 
spoken through all the Eastern cities in its be- 
half, and made James Watson Webb and Nich- 
olas Biddle his bosom confidants and counsel- 
lors; surely, if Mr. Clay, in 1848, had declared 
for free trade, against all tariffs, against river 
and harbor improvements, and against all the 
policy that had most signalized his life; surely, 
if Mr. Calhoun, during the controversy respect- 
ing the new Territories, had suddenly avowed 
himself the disciple of Clarkson and Wilber- 
force, and had raised the standard of "imme- 
diate emancipation;" surely, I say, neither of 
these events would have furnished such ample 
material of contradiction and amazement as 
are supplied by the melancholy case I am now 
considering. After having nurtured, tutored, 
and led Northern Anti-Slavery sentiment for 
thirty years; after having claimed the '-'patent- 
ed thunder " of the Wilmot Proviso; and after 
having discovered the North star, in a single 
day, without premonition or cause of change, 
Mr. Webster espouses doctrines more Southern 
than South Carolina, and becomes Calhouner 
than Mr. Calhoun. 

Where shall the searcher of history find a 
parallel for this ? I know of none. I can con- 
ceive but one — that of Moses, from the confines 
of Jordan, and the top of Pisgah. commanding 
the children of Israel to march back into the 
land of Egypt, for re-subjugation to Pharoah; 



21 

yet striving to persuade thorn that the (! geog- 
raphy w and " scenery " of the Nile would ren- 
der slavery there impossible. 

And yet, when the trial- hour of the Balti- 
more Convention came, what did he gain hy it 
all? A single Southern State? Not one. A 
single delegate from a Southern State ? Not 
one! With all the efforts that official power, 
and the wealth of cities, and ama/.ing industry, 
could make: with ail that subscription nom- 
inations, and Faneuil Hall meetings, and Cas- 
tle Garden committees, and Wall street, and 
State street, an I subsidized presses, and fraud- 
ulent hopes of tariff and Southern trade, could 
effect, Mr. Webster could rally but an average 
of twenty-nine votes in a convention of almost 
three hundred members; and never, on any bal- 
loting, according to the political thermometer 
which measured his popularity^ did he rise 
above thirty-two degrees — the point of eternal 
congelation'! No Southern State gave him a 
vote! No Southern delegate was sent there to 
give him a vote! Fifty-three opportunities oc- 
curred, extending from day to day, and, accord- 
ing to an account published in the Boston 
Courier, from a professed eye-witness of the 
scene, the Northern friends of Mr. Webster be- 
sought their Southern brethren with prayers 
and entreaties, sad and tearful enough to have 
melted flint, to have melted platinum, to have 
melted anything but the infusible heart of sla- 
very, and yet they were inexorable. Nay, ac- 
cording to 'the published statement of his friend, 
Doctor Bell, a delegate from the Fourth Con- 
gressional District of Massachusetts, after the 
fifty-second ballot, and when it became certain 
that General Seott would be nominated the 
next time, these Southern gentlemen '• were 
earnestly appealed to, as a matter of courtesy, 
and to place our candidate [Mr. Webster] right 
[wrong?] on the page of history, to unite in the 
final vote on Mr. Webster, which would have 
left him with some one hundred and twenty or 
thirty votes" — they refused to give him even 
that empty compliment. 

So certain has been the fate of Mr. Webster. 
for the last eighteen months, that I and all 
those with whom I am politically associated 
have foreseen it aad predicted it with as much 
confidence as an astronomer foretells an eclipse. 
Let us trust that the fate of such victims will 
not be lost for the future upon Northern men. 
Sir, out of thifl Fugitive Slave Law has 
arisen an ill-sounding, hall-barbarous word, to 
express the wholly barbarous idea that the law 
is never to be repealed or modified. It is the 
word '-Finality." This word has already got 
into somewhat common use in regard to its ob- 
jects. It is destined to get into universal use 
in regard to its authors. I think Genera! Cass 
and Mr. Buchanan, Mr. Fillmore and Mr. 
Web many others, have by this time 

an interior and realizing sense of what the 
•<"ord "finality" means. Though too late for 



them to profit by it, I hope it will be blessed to 
the use of others. 

And what palliation, what pretext, what sub- 
terfuge even, had these men for such betrayal 
of human rights? Nothing, literally nothing, 
but that fraudulent idea of 'danger to the 
Union y } that cry of 'vvoli;'' which the South 
always raises when she has an object to ac- 
complish; and which she will always continue 
to raise, on pretences more and more shadowy 
and evanescent, the more we have the folly to 
heed it. The same threat is now, at this in- 
stant time, made, if the North does not give 
them their choice in the two candidates for the 
Presidency. 

Among redundant proofs, demonstrating that 
the Union has been in no peril, nor shadow of 
peril, there are two which never have been an- 
swered, and never can be answer* d. Notwith- 
standing all that was done in this House, and 
more especially in the Senate, and by all the 
pro-slavery presses and pro-slavery champions. 
North and South, during the yar 1850, to 
create a panic in behalf of the Union, they 
Were never able to effect the price of the Uni- 
ted States stocks, neither in this country nor in 
Europe, so that the difference could be discov- 
ered with a microscope. Now, of all men liv- 
ing, stockholders and annuitants are the most 
sensitive. Universally they are a timid race. 
If there be a cloud in the heavens, or a rip- 
ple on the surface, they fear wreck, and shout 
the alarm. But timid as they constitutionally 
are. not politicians nor panic makers could dis- 
compose their serenity by all tl cries 
about the crumbling of the Union to pie-"-: 
and there was not a member of the Castle Gar- 
den committees who would have taken one 
cent less, or would not have given every cent 
as much, for United States securities on the 
days when they sent forth their fraudulent re- 
solves as before or after. 

On this point I will cite an authority whose 
soundness upon the question in issue I believe 
in, and certainly my opponents will not dispute 

'• Wo have preserved and Fostered credit till all 
- csl t,in its Cui thi r oontinuftn 
preservation. It has run deep and wide into our 
whole system of social : i feels the vi- 

bration -whe^n a blow is struck upon it. Ami this is 
the reason why nobody has escaped the influence of 
the Secretary's recent mCtourt. While credit is del- 
icate, sensitive, easily wounded, and more easily 
alarmed, it is also infinitely ramified, diversified! ox- 
ig everywhere, and touching everything.''* 

And yet the very men who. in their capacity 
of politicians, shrieked "dangei to the Union," 
in their other capacity of stock-dealers and 
merchants, never varied their asking or their 
giving prices one jot or tittle. They cried 
" earthquake/' when not a rumble could ho 
heard nor a jar felt; and they tried to make 

=* Webster's Spa r!u-—[ Spt eeh on the Removal of th» 
JJepo$ites\—vol. 4,jj- 92. 



22 



us believe that a tornado was uprooting the 
forests, when nobody could see a leaf on a tree 
moving. No! the cry of danger to the Union 
was raised to divert attention from their as- 
saults upon the Constitution. It was the lat- 
ter and not the former that was in danger. 

Another reason, and it is a standing and con- 
tinuous one. why there was no danger to the 
Union, consists in the fact that the South, ac- 
cording to their own estimate, are under bonds 
of $1,500,000,000 to keep the public peace. Let 
them break up this Union, and their property 
in slaves, which they now value at this enor- 
mous sum, will not, at the end of a quarter of 
a century, be worth so many groats. Does 
anybody imagine that this Union can be dis- 
solved without civil commotion, without revo- 
lution by arms'? Sir, this is a subject incon- 
ceivably painful; but it is a possibility spoken 
of and sported with by others with such levity, 
that I am constrained to invest it with some of 
its appropriate solemnities. Does any one be- 
lieve there can be two border nations, one 
founded on the principle of freedom, and the 
other on the basis of slavery, having a contig- 
uous frontier of three thousand miles, and dai- 
ly traversing the same waters, with immunity 
from war ? And in such wars, who will be 
the eager allies of the North ? Sir. there are 
ten thousand fugitive slaves in Canada to-dav, 
capable of bearing arm?, and their number is 
increasing faster than ever. They are prac 



areat his side, whose weakness or whose beau- 
ty, in presence of an imbruted foe. may provoke 
the first assault. Aye. sir, in a civil or a ser- 
vile war, the South will be in a more perilous 
condition than if every kernel of gunpowder in 
all the magazines of an army, just on the eve 
of battle, should suddenly become animated and 
set itself on fire. If the South wish to exhibit 
to the world, on a magnificent scale, the natu- 
ral retribution of slavery; if they wish to real- 
ize in their own fair land, and by Hyder Alis 
of their own, Burke's terrible picture of the 
desolation of the Carnatic, they have but one 
thing to do, and that is to dissolve this Union. 
But I do not fear any such madness will pos- 
sess them. As I said before, they are under 
bonds of $1,500,000,000 to keep the peace, and 
their wives and daughters are sureties in the 
bonds. All wealth that is consumable, all 
affection that is destructible, all chastity that 
is violable, are pledged for the fulfilment of 
their vows. 

Waiving a hundred other facts and consid- 
erations, the two which I have now specified 
are sufficient to show that this cry of " danger 
to the Union ' ; was wholly baseless and decep- 
tive. 

From another point of the compass, and from 
an independent series of facts, a similar moral 
may be drawn for future Presidential aspi- 
rants. Neither the Democratic party nor its 
Northern leaders had anything to gain by the 



ticing the use of fire-arms, and the menage of Mexican war, and yet they pluno-ed headlong 
the horse. The story of their oppressions is ' 



recounted every day, in every hamlet and at 
every fire-side. The mothers nurse their chil- 
dren with milk and with vengeance together. 
The knowledge of a North star is penetrating 
further and further into the Southern interior, 
and arousing new hearts to the effort of self- 
emancipation. A dissolution of the Union re- 
peals the accursed act of 1850. The free soil 
of Canada and the British Provinces — the only 
free Soil there now is on the Northeastern part 
of this continent — is brought down to Mason 
and Dixon's line. We have in the Northern 
States a population of two hundred thousand 
of African descent. In case of war between 
the two sections, thousands of this colored race 
will fly to the laud of bondage, swift as they 
ever flew from it. They will go to make deso- 
lation of the realm that once made desolation 
of them, and of all they held dear. Under 
their avenging cry, insurgents will rise up like 
an exhalation over all the South. There are 
no motives more terrible than those which urge 
a bondsman to his revenge. Perpetual prox- 
imity between master and slave, furnishes per- 
petual opportunity for retribution. Every 
house is an arsenal of weapons; every tool on 
the plantation an instrument of death. Fire 
and darkness are allies which nature proffers 
him. In this warfare, the master does not go 
into the battle alone ; his wife and children 



into it at the dictation of the South. The 
Whig party, as such, always pronounced the 
war itself to be an aggression, and its territo- 
rial acquisitions a robbery. Yet the great body 
of this party voted the supplies that ratified its 
inception. Opposition to the war of 1812 had 
proved politically disastrous to many of those 
who made it; and it. was foreseen that opposi- 
tion to the Mexican war might be attended 
with similar results. Hence the lukewarmness 
of Whig opposition in Congress, and hence the 
voting of supplies to carry it on. Hence the 
pro-slavery men and the •' manifest destiny " 
men were allowed to have their way; and so 
the war was continued, at an estimated ex- 
penditure, in the whole, of more than two 
hundred millions of dollars, and the ultimate 
acquisition of territory, some portion of which 
is already occupied by slaves, and two-thirds of 
which is laid open to slavery by law. 

And now, what has been the effect of that 
war upon both the Democratic and Whig ci- 
vilians, who either vigorously sustained it, or 
opposed to it only a feeble resistance ? It made 
the Cyesars who have come back to rule over 
Rome. But for the Mexican war, Gen. Taylor 
would have remained a "frontier Colonel," as 
Mr. Webster sneeringly called him, and not 
even lunacy would have conceived of him for 
President. But for the Mexican war, Genfrnl 
Scott, though in honor and in bravery ret 



23 



ing his invincibility, would have lacked, to po- 
litical wooers, the more potent charm of avail- 
ability, and would never have been nominated. 
And but for the Mexican war, the shades of 
oblivion would soon bave perfected their easy 
work of hiding the name of Gen. Pierce from 
the world forever. And now behold the civil- 
ians — Cass. Buchanan, Marcy, and the rest — 
who stood sponsors and godfathers for that 
bloody deed. Defeated in 1848 by the very 
man whom the war they supported had raised 
up! Gen. Taylor discomfited only one Santa 



Anna in Mexico, but half a dozen at home 
Look, too, at Mr Webster, whose giant blows. 
had they been struck at the fitting time, might 
have broken the helmet and pierced the mailed 
armor of that Mars; yet see him thrust aside 
in 1848. to make room for one hero born of that 
war: and in 1852 hardly allowed to enter his 
name as a competitor against another. In 
1852, also, see G< ueral Pierce, who had about 
as much to do with the Mexican victories as 
little lulus had with the Trojan war, yet pluck- 
ing the nomination from Cass, Buchanan, 
Marcy, Douglas, and all the rest. The camp 
triumphs over Cabinet and Senate. The cc- 
dant arma togcc is read backwards. How many 
of these warriors will remain in 1856, and in 
1860, to shoulder aside the civilians lor the third 
and fourth time, because they were false to 
their duty in waging or in tolerating that war, 
remains to be seen. But what a righteous 
retribution for those civilians who, at first, 
might have prevented, or afterwards might 
have stayed, that effusion of human blood! As 
a specimen of poetic justice, romance or drama 
has nothing finer. 

I have, sir. but one topic more to present, 
before I shall have sufficiently disobeyed and 
defied the Baltimore resolutions, for this time, 
and shall he ready to sit down. As I said be- 
fore, present omens forebode ill to the cause of 
freed- im, in this land : but a more searching anal- 
ysis throws a cheering light upon our prospects. 
Let us see, in the first place, why it is that 
the North, with almost two-thirds of Mm popu- 
lation and of the votes of the whole Union, is 
controlled on all questions pertaining to slavery 
by the other third belonging to the South. 
The answer is at hand. We at the North are 
divided into two parties — Whigs and Dcmo- 
cra ts — who balance, and in all political con- 
tests neutralize each other. Nominally, the 
South is divided into the same parties, but in 
whatever regards slavery it is undivided and a 
unit — indissoluble as the Siamese twins: for 
where you find Chang you are sure to find Eng. 
On tariffs, river and harbor improvements, and 
so forth, the)- carry on a feeble and somnolent 
warfare among themselves; but whenever the 
tocsi ' of slavery is sounded, they awaken to 
seize their arms, and form in solid column for 
a qu march to the point in contest. 

aiuing the feeblest support from 



the North — generally speaking by stealing 
marches upon us, while we are engrossed by 
our accustomed vocations — an easy triumph is 
won. The nominal division of parties, there- 
fore, is very far from being the true one. The 
country is, and for a long time Iras been, for all 
purposes aside from the spoils of office, divided 
into three parties of very nearly equal num- 
bers — the Whigs and Democrats of the North, 
and the Pro-Slavery party of the South — the 
latter, with the slightest aid, or even with ac- 
quiescence, from either of the others, being 
able to prevail. And this will continue to be 
the case, until a practical Anti-Slavery party 
is formed at the North, to balance this Pro- 
Slavery party of the South, and to do battle 
for liberty as they do for slavery. Such a 
party, in sufficient numbers to contend success- 
fully with its antagonists, may not be immedi- 
ately formed, and therefore I see before us a 
period of struggle and trial. But the spirit of 
God is on our side in this work. The laws of 
the moral universe, the laws of nature, the laws 
of population and power, are our allies, and 
therefore we must prevail. 

Look at the amazing fact that the Southern 
States, with more than double the area of the 
Northern, after an experiment of more than 
sixty years of free government, have but about 
half the free population of the latter. I say 
the area of the former is more than double the 
area of the latter ; but this is by no means the 
only element of their natural superiority. 
Their milder climate, their more fertile and 
easily-cultivated soil, and its happy adaptation 
for producing the great staples of commerce 
which the whole civilized world wdl have and 
are ready to pay for, gives to the South at 
least a two-fold advantage over the North, acre 
for acre, or State for State. With their super- 
eminent and easily-understood advantages, the 
Southern section of this Union might possess, 
and but for its slavery would to-day possess, 
three-fold the population of the Northern sec- 
tion — all free, all blessed with more abounding 
comforts and competence, and with all the 
means of embellishment, education, and univer- 
sal culture. As compared with the North in 
all that gives individual independence or social 
strength, instead of being as one to two, they 
should be as three to one. Ohio and Kentucky, 
separated only by a ribbon's width of water, 
illustrates this problem, even to school-boys. It 
is slavery, and slavery alone, that has struck 
them down from their lofty pre-eminence, that 
has dwarfed their gigantic capacities, and 
driven them to maintain an ascendency — ulti- 
mately worthless, and worse than worthless — 
by suborning Northern politicians, instead of 
exulting in the legitimate superiority of home- 
born and undecaying vigor. 

And this is only the fulfilment of an eternal 
law which always has been, and always will 
be. exemplified in the history of mankind — the 



24 



law that all error Is weakness ; that all wick- 
edness is dementia. By a law, fixed as gravi- 
tation, error tends to ruin, and moral wrong to 
imbecility. Let any individual act upon a false 
theory, and in that his hopes will be disap- 
pointed, and his fortunes maimed. Let a com- 
munity^ legalize false principles, or adopt evil 
institutions into its organic law — which is its 
sensorium — its strength becomes faintness. and 
its glory turns black. False notions, or even 
ignorance about the laws of health, bring dis 



If the Northern States of this Union, there 
fore, will cherish liberty while the Southerr 
foster slavery, the predominance of the forme] 
in political power, as well as in all other thing; 
desirable, will soon be overwhelming. Foreign 
annexations by the latter cannot redress the 
balance. They but palliate the symptoms of a 
distemper which is organic — as the newly- 
erected wing of a lazar-house for a time dilute? 
the infection, which it soon sends back to a 
gravate the general virulence. I appeal To 



" .,..,, — ;- — i ."-:"& fe .-.iv^ uuv, & cucia.i vuuiBuce. j. appeal w 

ease upon an individual, or endemics upon a the friends of liberty, then, wherever they may 



country. False conclusions in political economy 
bankrupt a city or the treasury of a nation. 
False metaphysical or theological dogmas 
cramp the faculties, vitiate the knowledge^and 
repress the aspirations of their possessors: and 
the schools or the sects that adopt them dwin- 
dle^ into weakness, become contemptible, and 
perish. God kills out error by the meanness 
of its results. Neither caste, primogeniture, 
nor hierarchy, can save it. The false notions 
of Aristotle, about the perfectness of the circle 
for motion, and the law of equilibrium for 
fluids, with other absurdities, kept the philo- 
sophic and inventive genius of the world in 
irons for two thousand years ; but then they 
passed into everlasting contempt. False max- 
ims in government, and false practices in po- 
litical economy, have worked out the terrible 
problem of Ireland's ruin, sending almost two 



millions of her people, through~disease and 
starvation, to the grave, or into exile, within 
the last ten years, and completing, by processes 
which make < destruction sicken," the dreadful 
demonstration of a crime which was begun six 
centuries ago, and has now passed into the Ge- 
henna of eternal execration wherever history 
shall be read. 

Now, as slavery is error and wickedness 
combined, it must incur the penalties ordained 
of God against both. As it corrupts domestic 
virtue, contravenes the natural laws of a na- 
tion's prosperity and growth, excludes and 
drives away those who are instinct with the 
love of freedom from settling within its bor- 
ders, makes general education impossible, and 
eviscerates from the Gospel of Jesus Christ the 
highest and purest of its principles and pre- 
cepts, it follows by a law of adamantine neces- 
sity, that the body politic, which suffers it, is 
vulnerable in every part, and that physical and 
moral death besieges every gate of its citadel. 
Slavery assails all the laws of Gird broadside; 
and it must therefore receive His retributions 
broadside. 

These are but specimens of the weakness 
which is always inflicted by error, and of the 
fatuity that ensues from moral wrong. T!my 
are specimens of those '-Higher Laws'" of God, 
•which fulfill their destiny, whether men heed 
them or defy. They crush the resistant while re- 
sisting, and silence* he blasphemer in mid volley. 



be found, to stand fast in 'their integrity ; for, 
to adopt the sentiment of Mr. Jefferson, in such 
a contest, there is not an attribute of the Al- 
mighty but must take part with us. 

S:r, I have endeavored now to speak upon 
the real and true state of the Union. I have 
desired to ascertain towards what point of the 
moral compass this great vehicle, which we 
call Government, freighted as it is with so 
much of human welfare, and with the fondest 
hopes of the oppressed, is now moving. I have 
sought to determine that direction, not by the 
meteoric lights which are exhaled from human 
passion and selfishness, but by taking observa- 
tion of the unchangeable luminaries of truth 
and duty, which shine down upon us forever 
from their fixed places in the skies. I have 
spoken no word in the spirit of a partisan or a 
politician : but have sought to embrace within 
my vision the horizon of the future as well as 
of the present. 

The mere politician judges of events by their 
immediate consequences — by their relation to 
himself and his party. Under our Constitution, 
the next four years is the politician^ eternity. 
The next election is his judgment day. The 
blessedness of his future consists in an antici- 
pated share of the $200,000,000 to be distribu- 
ted from the National Treasury during the 
next Presidential term, and in being one of the 
hundred thousand men who for the same peri- 
od are to be elevated into conspicuousness. But 
the eternity that I believe in will not end on 
the 4th of March. 1856. Consequences are to 
flow from events now passing, which are un- 
ending in their nature and their influence. In- 
terests are at stake infinitely more important 
than the temporary official prominence or ob- 
scurity of a hundred thousand men — infinitely 
niore precious than $200,000,000, or two hun- 
dred millions of Californias, with golden Aus- 
tralias to boot. He only is worthy the name 
of statesman, he only is fit to preside over the 
affairs of a great nation, whose vision takes ia 
the vast relations of cause and effect; whose 
judgment is determined by what must be ir 
the future, as well as by what exists in tin 
present, and who never erects a superstructure 
of Constitution or law for the protection or tL . 
enjoyment of any human intei 
laying its foundations on . " 







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